An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.
In this novel, two medieval scholars are asked to spy on their professor—who may have nefarious ties to a White supremacist group.
When Molly Isaacson first talks to Quinton Quick—they are both studying medieval history at Yale—the exchange doesn’t go so well. Molly unabashedly expresses her astonishment over Quinton’s race: “You’re a medievalist? But you’re Black!” Despite the rocky start, they quickly become good friends, both students under the intellectually impressive and controversial professor Abe Kantorowicz, who has garnered a reputation for breaking bread with Nazis and fascists, if only to criticize them. Molly and Quinton are suddenly approached by a humorously mysterious figure—despite the gravity of the story’s themes, Adamo often shoots for lightsome, if glib, comedy—FBI agent Nathaniel Mapp. With a “conspiratorial air,” Mapp asks the two students to surveil Kantorowicz, who he believes is working furtively with a White supremacist group. The author makes it tantalizingly unclear if Mapp’s suspicions are correct. Shortly after, Kantorowicz asks Molly and Quinton to assist him with an “archaeological experiment” to find a symbol that replaces the swastika as a unifying symbol of bigoted groups, a supposedly academic exercise in historical lucidity. Adamo intelligently combines the topical and the esoteric—at the heart of the novel is the alt-right’s appropriation of medieval symbols to brand their hateful cause. But this virtue doubles as a vice—the book flirts with an excessive academicism. Part of it reads like a classroom lecture while other sections are in fact precisely that. In addition, the author can’t resist drawing some facile and didactic conclusions about the nature of racism. Nevertheless, the story is refreshingly eccentric, and while it sometimes seems in danger of taking itself too seriously, the author’s comic impulses chasten that urge. This is an engrossing tale, a delightfully peculiar blend of intellectual and criminal investigation.
An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Split Infinitive Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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