Barring Titanic stories, this could be one of the most depressing books about a cruise ever written.
A Vermont doctor takes a position aboard a cruise ship after the death of her partner.
When we meet Jessie, she is grieving the recent deaths of her mother, her father, and her lover, and she is throwing her vibrator in the trash. Well, “you could hardly donate it to Goodwill for a tax deduction, or pass it down as an heirloom,” and who knows when it will be her turn to die? She doesn’t want her son finding it sitting alongside her VHS tape of Lesbian Hospital. Later that day, a woman’s battered corpse floats up to Jessie's lakeside house. Enough is enough. With weak connections to her children and zero interest in “spending her twilight years baby-sitting” their offspring, she impulsively accepts a job as a cruise physician, offered by a doctor friend with whom she had an affair long ago. Despite her dour mood, he and others aboard the ship are interested in her—whether or not she will stop obsessively reading her dead lover’s journal and accept these advances, or at least cheer up a little, is the main plot of the book. The most interesting character is a truly awful bitch, the former Miss Florida Power and Light, around whom sex and death promisingly swirl. But when the interesting questions raised in her plotline are left unanswered by the end of the cruise, the reader may be as dissatisfied as everyone else. After several mishaps, “the mood aboard the Amphitrite was glum.…Those who were not complete sociopaths had realized that they had been born into Western democracies through no merit of their own. They had paid tens of thousands of dollars to ride this luxury liner, eating and drinking themselves into prediabetic stupors, while others rode capsizing ghost ships, drinking their own urine.”
Barring Titanic stories, this could be one of the most depressing books about a cruise ever written.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65754-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
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