A gentle exploration of youthful indecision and curiosity.
In this debut YA novel, a young Irish boy finds a mysterious door beneath his family home in London that he uses to travel through time and space to a new, strange city across the ocean.
In 1961, 8-year-old Conor O’Loughlin’s family has been living a quiet life in England during the relative calm of the postwar years, but Conor doesn’t share his parents’ nostalgia for their home in Ireland. He’s a bright student, and the place where he lives feels confining to him. One day, he breaks into the abandoned pub below his family’s apartment, and it becomes his personal refuge. One day, he notices a locked door hidden in the back of the pub. It doesn’t seem like it would lead outside the building, so he resolves to unlock it and see what lies beyond it. When he manages to do so, he finds himself in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the middle of a 1961 riot involving police and demonstrators. Traumatized, he flees back through the door. It’s six years before he opens it again, but this time, at age 14, he’s taken with the city, which is so different from his own. He quickly befriends a writer, John, who takes him to museums, including the Guggenheim, and teaches him about agnosticism, fascism, Beat poetry, and modern art. But Conor’s ties to London never let him stay for long. For a time, he balances his two lives, but each starts to demand more from him—and eventually Conor has to make a choice. Overall, this is a slow and measured coming-of-age story. First-time novelist McCormack focuses on smaller moments, mainly putting effort into showing how Conor learns and changes over time rather than putting emphasis on momentous events. However, despite the author’s attempts to depict a gritty New York City, the story doesn’t really seem built to contain it; instead, everything is in soft focus, apparently in order to accommodate a story of a teen discovering himself. Still, the novel fits comfortably into the YA sci-fi/fantasy genre even if it doesn’t dwell on the magic at its center.
A gentle exploration of youthful indecision and curiosity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-911013-00-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: McCormack Press
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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