A fine debut, unsettling and magical.
Elegant prose distinguishes a first novel set in modern Ireland that reads like a reclaimed folktale.
Narrator Clodagh begins the story with her own birth, a sad affair dominated by the loneliness of her mother, Agatha. As a teenager, Agatha slept in caves and wandered the seaside fields of Frank Sheehy's estate. Sickly, frail Frank fell in love with the white-haired wandering girl, scrubbed the calluses off her feet, and married her. But, as Clodagh states in the opening, Agatha "was never easy in the world of houses," which helps explain why her neighbors began saying she wasn't a woman at all but a selkie: a seal lured from the sea by the love of a man, a selkie sheds her animal skin for a moment of passion and is doomed to the land until she can reclaim her skin, traditionally hidden by the new husband. When Frank dies, pregnant Agatha is sent to a grand house far away to raise Clodagh and her ailing twin, Mare. Clodagh uses the selkie myth to explain her mother's strange behavior: Agatha's penchant for wandering the cliffs and violent shoreline, for closing up the expansive house and living roughly in the kitchen, for disappearing at night wearing a sealskin dress bedecked with shells. There may be a simpler explanation: born to tinkers, Agatha longs for their unsettled life of traveling by horse-drawn caravan from town to town selling bits of pottery and ephemera. Mare dies, and Agatha becomes more unhinged and distant, spending days at a time at the tinker's camp, where Clodagh is sure she has a lover. One day, as Clodagh watches, Agatha returns to the sea. Sent to boarding school, Clodagh uses music to mend her sorrow, but the history of the shadowy Agatha calls to her when she meets a beautiful tinker man and follows him to become his lover. When he reveals startling secrets about himself and Agatha, the story becomes less mythic—and far more tragic.
A fine debut, unsettling and magical.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0323-2
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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