by Michael Christie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 2015
Dark, threatening, dislocating and altogether brilliant.
Do we really have nothing to fear but fear itself? Perhaps—but, as the characters in Canadian writer Christie’s deftly written first novel instruct us, our worries, even though debilitating, may not be altogether groundless.
Cairo, Venice, London, Thunder Bay: Young Will, artist and reader, is everywhere and nowhere. His mother is certifiable: afraid of the Outside, afraid of people, afraid of animals, prisoner of the deep mood that Will calls the Black Lagoon, yet a willing traveler of the mind, the rooms in her close-walled home named for faraway places. As the novel opens, the boy is Outside, tentatively ascertaining that it will not kill him: “He was not riddled with arrows, his hair did not spring into flame, and his breath did not crush his lungs like spent grocery bags.” That doesn't mean he’s safe. Social anxiety disorder finds literary expression in Christie’s pages, which have all the bleakness of a Stephen King fright-night yarn but none of the inevitability; just when the story begins to resolve out of seeming hallucination, Christie conjures other tricks, writing both elegantly and with the innocence of a child (“they used to share bathwater but they stopped because of vaginas”). Will, his mother’s protector, is nothing but a casualty waiting to happen, whether gazing at the world from a rooftop or tiptoeing through the mouse turds and ant trails of their house; still, the greatest danger, as his mother fears, might just be that he finds out things he shouldn’t: “But now, given Will’s curious nature, he’d soon be retrieving painful morsels of her past like a terrier with a mouse in its jaws.” Reminiscent of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Christie’s fine novel is really a kind of spiritual cousin of Paul Harding’s Tinkers as a study of people who are in this world but not quite of it, whether ghosts from a grain-silo explosion or the people you see at the supermarket.
Dark, threatening, dislocating and altogether brilliant.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4080-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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by Toni Morrison edited by David Carrasco Stephanie Paulsell Mara Willard
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