Stott fills holes in written history with magic, mythic resonance, and 21st-century wish fulfillment.
The author of In the Days of Rain (2017) and Darwin’s Ghosts (2012) returns to fiction with a mix of history and fantasy.
“Dark earth” is the name geologists give to the layer of dirt—rich in organic matter, sometimes flecked with artifacts—that indicates a long period of human settlement. The narrative that Stott constructs here is built from an actual archaeological find—a Saxon brooch unearthed in the ruins of a bathhouse—and the figurative dark earth of the city once called Londinium. Beginning in the first century B.C.E., Britain was a Roman province for almost 400 years, and the historical record for the 500-year period after the occupiers withdrew is scant. Stott builds a rich world from fragments of fact and mythic imagining. Her central character, Isla, lives with her sister, Blue, and their father on an island in the Thames. A smith with the rare gift of making “firetongued” swords, Isla’s father is captive to Osric, Seax Lord of the South Lands; when he dies, Isla must deliver a sword to Osric without revealing that her father broke the taboo against teaching a woman his craft. Once she and Blue arrive at Osric’s court, they have to navigate complex politics after having been raised in isolation. Ultimately, they will have to flee for their lives into the “Ghost City” that has fallen into ruin since the “Sun Kings” disappeared. Stott presents a diverse Dark Ages. Isla and Blue are friends with—and protected by—Caius, descended from a line of African soldiers recruited by the Romans and now working for the Saxons who rule the south of Britain. There are Christian priests and Wiccans and a woman named Crowther who is a priest to Isis. In the Ghost City, Isla and Blue meet runaways from many lands. Most of them are women, and Isla falls in love with one of them. The conflict at the climax of this novel is not a clash of arms but a battle between brute power and cunning, between selfish greed and communal strength.
Stott fills holes in written history with magic, mythic resonance, and 21st-century wish fulfillment.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8911-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
A finely wrought story, beautifully told, with deeply memorable characters.
After accidentally causing the death of a fellow driver, a Maine woman does time in prison and then reestablishes her life on the outside.
Violet Powell was just 19, drunk and high, when she caused the death of Lorraine Daigle, a beloved mother and kindergarten teacher. She is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Though she thinks she won’t be able to survive, she does. Prison turns out to be excruciating and monotonous, and while she’s serving time, Troy, her “boyfriend-slash-fiancé-slash-future-slash-everything,” never writes or visits. Even worse, her mother dies and her family blames her. The book club that meets every Friday is her solace, along with Kitten, Jennie Big, Aimee, Dawna-Lynne, and the seven other members of the group. The discussions, in which Violet and her fellow inmates get to exert some control over their lives by complaining about books, are a brief respite. Harriet, the former teacher who leads the group, and the other women are willing to see Violet’s humanity. Violet, who will never forgive herself for her bad choices, is both the best of herself and the worst of herself at every moment. When she’s released, her sister drops her in Portland with a prepaid one-year lease on a furnished apartment, money, clothes, and the information that no one in her town or family can forgive her or wants to see her again. She must find her own way. A chance meeting with Harriet in a bookstore turns into an unexpected meeting with Frank Daigle, husband of the woman whose death she caused. This gorgeously told story follows the first few months after Violet’s release, what she calls the shimmering time, as she tries to define herself on the outside. And at first, only Harriet and Frank are willing to see her for who she is.
A finely wrought story, beautifully told, with deeply memorable characters.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780063243675
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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