A moving story of pursuing one’s goals through pain and loss.
A young musician deals with love, heartbreak, and addiction in DeBellis’ debut novel.
As the story opens in 2017 in Redlands, California, 22-year-old Santiago DeAngelo’s friend Abby Wilson asks him if he’s going to make any New Year’s resolutions. Santiago, a talented musician who’s four years into a five-year architecture degree and plans to apprentice with his successful architect father, tells her he doesn’t need to make any resolutions: “I’m right on track.” But life has other plans: While driving home with his mother, Ana, their car is struck by an SUV, and after a few days, his grief-stricken father decides to take his severely injured wife off life support. The family—father, son, and sister Lucy—is devastated by the loss, which encourages Santiago to lose himself in the fog of his postoperative pain medication. With Lucy’s help, he eventually starts to process his grief, but by that time, he’s also struggling with a Vicodin addiction. He pursues his dream of a music career and starts to find some success; however, he also meets a woman named Kitty Holladay who seems perfectly comfortable feeding his drug habit, which she sees as keeping his music flowing; he thinks that she’s “opened up a portal into a variation of my life where I could be happy,” but his family members think otherwise. The narrative, told in fast-moving chapters, charts Santiago’s rise in the music industry, his unhealthy relationships, and his ongoing drug dependence. His collaboration with Kitty is energizing; when they come up with a future hit song, she tells him, “A product like this is the miracle of pop music.” However, that energy comes at a very high cost.
Over the course of this novel, DeBellis crafts a story of one man’s rise and fall with remarkable empathy and sharp, often lovely prose. Overall, Santiago often comes across as a bit of a puzzle, as his keen intelligence doesn’t seem to allow him to see the damage he’s doing to his own life; the moment when he finally says “I can’t live like this anymore” is likely to strike many readers as coming far too late. However, he’s an unquestionably well-realized character, and the author does a particularly sensitive job of depicting the thorny interplay between him and his father; the latter initially blames Santiago for causing Ana’s death, and things don’t get too much better from there. The book’s most effective plot thread, however, is an interior one: Santiago’s powerful artist’s personality confronting a persistent pill addiction: “I don’t expect you to save me,” he writes to another character while deep in its throes. “I won’t lie and tell you that I’ll never take another pill. But I will say that you're the first person who ever made me feel like I could quit.” The dramatic, shifting tides of faith that others have in the protagonist bring his difficulties into sharp relief, which makes it easy for readers to root for the troubled artist.
A moving story of pursuing one’s goals through pain and loss.Pub Date: June 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986167206
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Paradise Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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