Fresh and surprisingly real.
Family is open to definition for three wildly unconventional women, their assorted lovers and a pack of rescue dogs.
Alice is a professional gambler, a loner with a serious knowledge of horseflesh. She’s debating whether to kick her latest lover, Clayton (aka “the big oaf”), to the curb when he more or less accidentally kills someone. Alice’s half-sister Eloise, both damaged and beautiful, makes strange stuffed animals that are only one manifestation of her curious intelligence. Their mother Kimberley could almost pass for the most normal of the three. A former wild girl, she is now living a clean and sober life in bucolic Woodstock, N.Y., where she looks after a motley assembly of unwanted dogs, several of which she palms off on her NYC-based daughters. When a series of crises brings Alice and Eloise to their mother’s Catskills retreat, they find more than a few surprises. The previously lesbian Kimberley has taken up with a male neighbor. She’s also started working for a local movie star, Ava, who takes a shine to the previously straight Eloise. Kimberley gives her daughters a shocker of a revelation that causes them to reconsider relationships and the few life plans they’d made. Estep (Flamethrower, 2006, etc.) brings her distinctive characters to lusty life with funny, profane prose. The emotional payoff, when it comes, is both warm and somehow wildly funny.
Fresh and surprisingly real.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933354-81-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
Like the many-windowed mansion at its center, this richly furnished novel gives brilliantly clear views into the lives it...
Their mother's disappearance cements an unbreakable connection between a pair of poor-little-rich-kid siblings.
Like The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer or Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach, this is a deeply pleasurable book about a big house and the family that lives in it. Toward the end of World War II, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy surprises his wife, Elna, with the keys to a mansion in the Elkins Park neighborhood of Philadelphia. Elna, who had no idea how much money her husband had amassed and still thought they were poor, is appalled by the luxurious property, which comes fully furnished and complete with imposing portraits of its former owners (Dutch people named VanHoebeek) as well as a servant girl named Fluffy. When her son, Danny, is 3 and daughter, Maeve, is 10, Elna's antipathy for the place sends her on the lam—first occasionally, then permanently. This leaves the children with the household help and their rigid, chilly father, but the difficulties of the first year pale when a stepmother and stepsisters appear on the scene. Then those problems are completely dwarfed by further misfortune. It's Danny who tells the story, and he's a wonderful narrator, stubborn in his positions, devoted to his sister, and quite clear about various errors—like going to medical school when he has no intention of becoming a doctor—while utterly committed to them. "We had made a fetish out of our disappointment," he says at one point, "fallen in love with it." Casually stated but astute observations about human nature are Patchett's (Commonwealth, 2016, etc.) stock in trade, and she again proves herself a master of aging an ensemble cast of characters over many decades. In this story, only the house doesn't change. You will close the book half believing you could drive to Elkins Park and see it.
Like the many-windowed mansion at its center, this richly furnished novel gives brilliantly clear views into the lives it contains.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-296367-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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