A sometimes bleak but engrossing tale of misdeeds and untrustworthy loved ones.
In this novel, an Irishman’s coming-of-age story involves members of his family and their ever expanding criminal records.
A nearly 30-year-old Mickey Collins, hailing from Cork, Ireland, relays his tale from behind bars. At a young age, he learns that crime is simply a part of everyday life. His mother, Tanya, gives jobs to her kids, like drug pickups, and they shoplift clothes with their uncle. Mickey and his older brother, Cillian, get into their own trouble as well, as they sample drugs at their home and (maybe accidentally) burn down an empty building. As years pass, the family’s crimes send the brothers and their sisters to various foster homes before they ultimately go back to Tanya. But as Mickey gets older, run-ins with the law land him in prison. Any time he messes up, as when he supposedly rats out Tanya, his less-than-doting mother berates him mercilessly. Sadly, there comes a point in many criminals’ lives when they have to shift blame onto others to protect themselves. But when Tanya turns on Mickey, it may be out of pure spite. Forde stylizes his novel as a transcription of Mickey’s interviews. As such, the narration meanders, as if Mickey is saying whatever pops into his head. The mostly linear story nevertheless shows clear progression; Tanya becomes more precarious, and adult Mickey’s time locked up is a veritable revolving door. Characters, including Mickey, are generally unlikable, with friends and family members double-crossing one another and rarely owning up to the crimes they commit or find themselves convicted of. Still, humor permeates the absorbing novel, especially Mickey’s unorthodox way of identifying years. As he recalls events, he can only roughly estimate his age (even his current one), and he often gauges the time frame by using his youngest sister (before and after her birth and during Tanya’s pregnancy). It all culminates in an unforgettable open ending that’s prime material for readers to debate.
A sometimes bleak but engrossing tale of misdeeds and untrustworthy loved ones.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73912-080-1
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Spright Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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