A well-researched historical epic, but its enthusiasm for trivial details impedes the natural flow of the story.
This whirlwind novel of the Irish-American experience traces one couple’s journey from an impoverished Irish community to a triumphant life in America.
In 1848, 16-year-old Brian O’Rourke is a poor violinist who plays songs to comfort his starving countrymen. Elizabeth Reilly is a teenage pianist from a well-to-do family who’s skeptical of bourgeois marriage. Gradually, the two become star-crossed lovers and separately leave Ireland to pursue their dreams. Elizabeth arrives in Paris and studies with Frédéric Chopin, who abruptly dies of tuberculosis, and then moves to Virginia. Brian lands in New York and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad and then the Civil War. The book’s most interesting thread is Brian’s aptitude for cryptography and telegraphy, which makes him a unique asset to the North. Brian eventually meets President Abraham Lincoln and becomes an intelligence officer. The narrator changes with every chapter, from Brian and Elizabeth to lesser characters like Elizabeth’s Aunt Bess and Solicitor Charles Reilly. Rooney (The Acheron Deception, 2014) writes in the first-person present tense, which lends urgency to the narrative. Whether he’s describing a Utah sunset or a grisly amputation, the prose is rich in detail. Unfortunately, the book is mired in exposition, and the dialogue can sometimes be encyclopedic in tone. Toward the end, for example, Brian asks his nephew David about his new car, to which he replies: “It’s from the Winton Motor Carriage Company in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a thousand dollars. It has an odorless hydrocarbon engine that can reach twenty miles an hour, and suspension wire wheels that minimize passenger jostling on a bumpy road.” Other characters relate facts, such as a definition of “Black Irish,” for no apparent reason save to educate readers. The book also sometimes rushes through its more tender moments; only minutes after Elizabeth delivers a child, for example, the new parents have a casual discussion about the nature of God.
A well-researched historical epic, but its enthusiasm for trivial details impedes the natural flow of the story.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9907436-2-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: SAVOIR Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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