A nuanced exploration of trauma, personal and historical.
An American woman revisits the scene of a traumatic experience she suffered as a teenager in McBride’s novel.
In 1973, a 16-year-old Violet O’Halloran travels from her home in New York City to Northern Ireland with her mother, but the trip is clouded by her grandmother’s unexpected death. Violet’s mother unloads the rebellious teen at St. Dymphna’s, a Catholic boarding school, for the duration. Her sole companion is the only other resident, Indira Sharma, a blind girl who speaks in enigmatic riddles. The pair become fast friends, inseparable as sisters, bonding over their contentious relationships with their mothers and the absences of their dead fathers; their tender connection is delicately drawn by the author in this emotionally haunting work. Indira dies in a drowning accident—Violet nearly dies herself trying to rescue her. It’s a traumatic event she has trouble clearly recollecting, and from which she cannot fully be free. In New York City, 13 years later, Violet meets Emmett Fitzroy, a handsome photographer who grew up near St. Dymphna’s. He invites her to become the temporary caretaker of his family’s home there, a position she accepts, plunging back into memories of her summer there and the “catastrophic land” she cannot help but miss. In this subtle and complex tale, the author explores the possibility that both the proximate and remote past can be mined for lucidity and the idea that the dead can help the living discover an otherwise elusive resolution to emotional conflicts, albeit with great difficulty. (“The Irish say it is only a thin curtain that separates the living from the dead, but they are poets and those are beautiful words. It is a harder partition than that, and more mysterious. There are times when it feels impenetrable.”) McBride’s prose is ruminatively poetic and broodingly searching, and powerfully captures Violet’s distress against the symbolically pregnant backdrop of Northern Ireland’s political tumult. This is a deeply thoughtful work, elegiac and impressively sensitive.
A nuanced exploration of trauma, personal and historical.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781963101010
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Green City Books
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
