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
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect(1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools countrywide.
In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: He murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come.
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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