McAuley, a British broadcast journalist, raises potentially interesting questions, but her answers come too easily to her...
Debut about a woman who searches for her adopted daughter’s birth parents, then makes an earnest attempt to grapple with issues of sin and forgiveness, largely within the context of Catholicism.
Narrator Lena, a middle-aged, happily conventional English woman whose active practice of Catholicism is a given, has been married to handsome, successful businessman Jack for years. Their adopted daughter, Mary, 27, is now a rising international opera singer. Out of the blue, Lena receives a phone call from Sister Monica, the nun who arranged for them to adopt Mary as an infant in Ireland and who now says she is checking on her babies as she prepares to retire. The call piques Lena’s curiosity. Adopted herself, she regrets she was unable to trace her own birth parents after her adopted mother’s death. With Jack away on a business trip and Mary about to perform in Dublin, Lena decides to take a week’s vacation in Ireland with her agnostic, mildly bohemian friend Alma before attending Mary’s concert. She doesn’t tell Jack or Mary that, as a kind of gift to Mary, she’s thinking of looking more deeply into Mary’s parentage. While Alma begins a romance with a kindly widower staying at their inn, Lena shifts her search into high gear, helped by the happy coincidence (one of too many) that the innkeeper’s wife is a volunteer at the Natural Parents’ Internetwork office. Gathering clues, Lena begins to suspect that Sister Monica’s brother, the well-known Singing Priest, Father Frank, may be Mary’s father, the reason for the nun’s unusual interest. Lena’s moral code, already challenged by her own secrecy, faces further tests when she realizes that Mary is having a highly publicized affair with a married actor and then learns that Jack, not Father Frank, is Mary’s father. Can she forgive him?
McAuley, a British broadcast journalist, raises potentially interesting questions, but her answers come too easily to her manufactured and bland characters.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-073788-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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