A very fine novel about a mother’s love and a son’s survival.
A woman and her son live with bad judgment, bad company, and bad breaks in Triant’s latest novel.
Fay is a water tank escape artist with a sketchy touring show called “Amazing Humans.” She and her teenage son, Dickie, aka Pete Smith, and her loser boyfriend, Johnson, are scraping by in Key West. A letter from her friend Ginny says that the Amazing Humans act has a gig at a rehab place in Vietnam, where there is big money to be made. Off Fay goes, and of course there is no big money to be made, and Vietnam is a dangerous hellhole. She is desperate to get back home, where she has left her son in the dubious care of Johnson. Chuck, her obsessive lover and the owner of Amazing Humans, will not let her break her yearlong contract. But break it she does when a white phosphorous, or “Willie Pete,” device explodes and she winds up back in the States, alive but hideously disfigured and desperate to find Dickie. Meanwhile Dickie flees Key West, winds up in New York City, and eventually makes a sort-of life for himself in Provincetown on Cape Cod with his friend Spin, who has AIDS. Having known only trailers in his youth, Dickie longs for a home that’s not on wheels. Fay, in her transactional world, always comes out on the short end of transactions. In this novel from the author of The Treehouse(2018), the symbolism comes through loud and clear: Fay is an escape artist who can’t escape her circumstances, and Dickie was left with a disability from early polio after his mother rejected the vaccine. Those who expect a feel-good novel to come from all this will be disappointed. But they will be captured by very good writing and wonderful portraits of Fay and Dickie, who eventually achieves one of his dreams—and who, in the last line of the book, reveals something that suggests that he may finally be escaping from his mother’s water tank.
A very fine novel about a mother’s love and a son’s survival.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-405-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
