Grandmother Bernadine is impossible not to love, but the book itself is a blatant marketing retread that lives up to neither...
Slightly overweight Irish 30-something with a glamorous job and her own apartment in Manhattan learns the secrets of success in marriage, along with traditional recipes from her Irish grandmother.
As Prunty’s second novel (Wild Cats and Colleens, 2001) opens, Tressahas finds herself reconsidering her marriage to the super of her Upper West Side apartment building. Dan is handsome (of course), uncomplicatedly nice and madly in love with her, but days after their perfect Catholic wedding, Tressa, a successful cookbook writer and kitchen-design consultant, is already questioning whether he is Mr. Right or merely Mr. Available. Everything about him irritates her. Nevertheless, she grudgingly agrees to move into the house he’s restoring in Yonkers, where she must endure his crass, fried-meat-eating Irish-American family. As they renovate the kitchen together, Tressa’s brittle disdain for much of what Dan represents begins to soften. Still, roadblocks crop up in the form of her sophisticated friends, a couple of her more tempting former lovers and Dan’s devotion to his monosyllabic mother. Although there’s little suspense as to whether this marriage can be saved, readers won’t find much chemistry between Tressa and Dan. Slipped within Tressa’s narration are the recipes of her adored Irish grandmother Bernadine, whom Tressa has always assumed had a perfect marriage. But Bernadine’s memoirs—which Tressa will not read until after her first anniversary—reveal that Bernadine married her gentle husband James without loving him and spent most of her marriage assuming her heart belonged to the American with whom she’d had a passionate adolescent romance that ended when her family would/could not come up with the dowry his mother required. Bernadine is clear-eyed and brutally honest about her shortcomings while she paints James as saintly in his patience.
Grandmother Bernadine is impossible not to love, but the book itself is a blatant marketing retread that lives up to neither Sex and the City nor Bridget Jones.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-0197-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
The heart-expanding extremes of life—first love and last rites—are experienced by an unsettled young Dubliner spending one exceptional spring in a small Irish village.
Christy McMahon “walked this line between the comic and the poignant,” and so does Williams (History of the Rain, 2014, etc.) in his latest novel, another long, affectionate, meandering story, this one devoted to the small rural community of Faha, which is about to change forever with the coming of electricity to the parish. Delighting in the eccentricities of speech, behavior, and attitude of the local characters, Williams spins a tale of life lessons and loves new and old, as observed from the perspective of Noel Crowe, 17 when the book’s events take place, some six decades older as he narrates them. Noel’s home is in Dublin, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, but he's lost his faith and retreated to the home of his grandparents Doady and Ganga in Faha. Easter is coming, and the weather—normally infinite varieties of rain—turns sunny as electrical workers cover the countryside, erecting poles and connecting wires. Christy, a member of the electrical workforce, comes to lodge alongside Noel in Doady and Ganga's garret but has another motive: He’s here to find and seek forgiveness from the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years earlier. While tracing this quest, Williams sets Noel on his own love trajectory as he falls first for one, then all of the daughters of the local doctor. These interactions are framed against a portrait of village life—the church, the Gaelic football, the music, the alcohol—and its personalities. Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity.
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-420-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
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