A fun, folkloric tale of fairies, family, faith and fantasy.
In Cranny’s (The Storm, 2001, etc.) latest novel, an old Irish man reminisces about the mythical happenings in his family’s home village.
When young Jack Gogarty accompanies his aunt Lill, a nun, from Dublin to West Wicklow, he expects nothing more than to spend a summer with his distant relatives, including his uncle Frank; Frank’s sister, Nan; and his father’s aunt Maggie. As Jack moves through his summer, he meets a cast of village characters, including a helpful boy named Ned; Sister Augusta, who runs a nearby orphanage; and Father Vaughan, the local parish priest. He slowly realizes that the hamlet’s facade is not what it appears. For example, Nan tells him stories about fairies and of the legend of a magical white deer, who shows himself to few; it turns out that Jack can see it, but he isn’t sure if he believes in the legend. Later, he sees Ned dancing with fairies, and as he spends more time with Aunt Maggie, he realizes that she appears not to age; instead, she’s getting younger and more beautiful. Could it be that, despite the pleas, punishments and proselytizing of Father Vaughan, West Wicklow is better for never leaving its “pagan” ways behind? The author paints a wildly vivid picture of Jack’s village experience, and the descriptions become more intricate as Jack looks deeper into the town’s pagan rituals. It’s a great literary device that immerses the reader into Jack’s consciousness. Overall, the story strikes the perfect balance of fantasy and reality, juxtaposing dreamlike vignettes with everyday scenes from an Irish village, including a knock-down, drag-out football match between two rival teams. The tale also addresses questions about faith: Is one kind of faith better than another? Is it possible to consider more than one main story? As the characters grapple with these issues, readers can contemplate them as well. But although this tale is thought-provoking, it doesn’t involve heavy lifting. Instead, it’s a joyful look at what can happen when you choose to believe, to open your eyes and see what wasn’t there before.
A fun, folkloric tale of fairies, family, faith and fantasy.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481987172
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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