An earnest novel about the insecurities of adolescence and the impossibility of escaping one's past.
Spanning two decades and a continent, this novel traces the consequences of rash decisions made in youth.
It's 1997 in Southern California. When 14-year-olds Meghan and Judy sneak away to find Cassie—supposedly a model—whom they’ve grown to adore in a chat room, their disappointing mothers barely notice their daughters’ absences. This parental neglect and the girls’ lack of cellphones add a note of terror to what happens next. Cassie isn’t home, but her senile great-aunt is, and she locks Meghan and Judy in Cassie’s bedroom. In alternating chapters, a third-person narrator relates the girls’ plight—to amuse themselves in captivity, they read Cassie's diary—and Cassie’s story. Cassie seems unaware that visitors were coming and has embarked on a bus journey from California to find her own disappointing mother in a Nevada commune. All of this happens in the first of the novel's three parts, which function almost as separate novellas. The second follows brothers Miles and Caleb, whose wealthy family moves from San Francisco, where 14-year-old Miles was secretly involved with a male friend, to Detroit, where much-older Caleb gets involved in the city's underground graffiti scene via a fellow skateboarder named Tez. Soon Caleb ropes Miles into the dangerous fun. This portion of the book, set in 1996, culminates in a series of events that shed unflattering light on Caleb’s character. The third portion of the book, set in 2016 New York, asks whether former sinners change. Caleb is dating Judy, who now goes by Jude. As the action opens, Jude’s mother, Bonnie, is flying east to visit her daughter and finally make amends for her alcoholism and toxic relationships, which stained Judy’s childhood. To say too much about what happens over the course of her four-day visit would spoil the book, which ties up many (though not all) dangling plot threads. There are a few too many characters for comfort: Meghan, Cassie, Miles, and Tez all get outsized attention given their secondary roles in the arc of the novel. Until Part 3, it is unclear who will matter, and it can be disappointing when beloved figures are forgotten. Still, the prose is good, the plot progresses at a satisfying clip, and the characters are endearingly flawed (except for Judy/Jude, whose only moral flaw is having a bad mother, lover, and friend). Gallagher writes meaningfully about the intergenerational impacts of addiction, abuse, and sexual violence.
An earnest novel about the insecurities of adolescence and the impossibility of escaping one's past.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81784-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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