A sluggish IRA tale with a touch of romance that should impress readers with its political acumen.
A young woman becomes torn between two men as she grapples with a tragedy in this political and religious thriller set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s “Troubles.”
In December 1978, Jennifer Hamilton’s priority is telling her parents she wants to drop out of college and focus on the violin rather than the religious warfare plaguing Northern Ireland between the British Protestants and Irish Roman Catholics. On her family’s farm, their idyllic life and Protestant faith are isolated from the frequent bombings of the Troubles. But this changes in her 20s. She and a friend skip class and barely miss an Irish Republican Army bombing, but witness the death of a child. A few months later, she joins her parents for afternoon tea at a cafe when a car bomb detonates outside the building, incinerating her parents and severely injuring Jennifer. She cannot bear to return to the farm where happiness no longer resides, and lands in the arms of a previous casual lover, Mike McLeod. He’s an unsuitable suitor due to his rank as a sergeant in the British army (McLeod is a “soldier in an army of occupation”). But he offers Jennifer security and potential revenge when he conscripts her into a covert operation against the IRA. Jennifer is sent to infiltrate an IRA cell by posing as a violinist in a band of suspected sympathizers. Maintaining her detachment undercover becomes difficult when the band leader, Séan Maguire, turns out to be so sexy and attentive. Jennifer's heart is confused as she struggles to decide where her true romantic and political loyalties lie, and where she belongs as a rudderless adult. In this historical novel, Shannon (Tales from Erin, 2016, etc.) is clearly drawing on her own personal background and experiences as a Northern Ireland native. The dialogue includes Gaelic phrases, and the text is enriched by historical references to killings and bombings (a Radio Ulster newscaster, with an Anglo-Northern Irish accent, tells listeners at one point: “On Friday two members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army were killed in the Ardoyne in Belfast, when the car bomb they were transporting exploded prematurely”). But the novel is too prolonged, with a slow pace that fails to maintain the plot’s tension. Entire chapters of band performances could be edited to beneficial effect.
A sluggish IRA tale with a touch of romance that should impress readers with its political acumen.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-79655-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Sheffield Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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