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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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