A tonally uneven trip back to a bygone Californian age.
A woman moves to Venice Beach to escape her controlling family.
For a book that opens with an event dubbed “the Great Duck Massacre of 1993,” Huffey’s novel ventures into surprisingly imposing emotional territory. At its center is Francine Ephesians Didwell, a woman who’s recently moved to Venice Beach. (And, in fact, that year did see dozens of ducks hunted and killed to keep a virus from spreading.) Francine’s reasons for moving there have to do with grief: Her paramour, Cyrus, died before the book opens, and she remains haunted by his memory. Her relationship with him also helped to distance her from her very religious family, described as “a cult of two parents and three siblings.” Francine has other reasons for wanting to stay away from her family, especially her father—who, we eventually learn, is capable of horrific acts. In the aftermath of Cyrus’ death, Francine finds that she’s returned to her family’s orbit even as she bonds with her new neighbors and attempts to find her own passions—including a love of tap dancing, sparked by a Gregory Hines performance. The most moving parts of this novel are when Huffey describes Francine having to stifle aspects of her truest self when around her family: “From now on, while in the Holy City of Monrovia she must always be a good Didwell, and pretend to go to church, and never mention the name of Cyrus, and honor Mr. Didwell’s status: perfect as God is perfect.” It’s at these moments when the book is most resonant. The tonal shifts between the comic and the harrowing are jarring at times, but Huffey’s empathy for her protagonist is tangible.
A tonally uneven trip back to a bygone Californian age.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953002-09-9
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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