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WHEN WE GET THERE

Name: WHEN WE GET THERE
Author: Shauna Seliy
ISBN: 978-1-59691-350-9

by Shauna Seliy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007

Deeply felt and written with immaculate care to create a fictional world that feels truly lived in.

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This first novel lovingly parses a mid-1970s western Pennsylvania community of farmers and miners, largely of Eastern European descent, whose way of life is coming apart as the coal mines close.

Thirteen-year-old Lucas’s handsome and universally respected and loved father Jimmy died in a mining explosion years earlier. Now Lucas’s adored mother Mirjana has disappeared, leaving behind only a short note. Staying with his feisty grandmother, nicknamed Slats, Lucas grudgingly finds himself enfolded into his large extended family, centered on Great-grandfather, the family patriarch. Confused and lonely, Lucas wants only to find his mother, but he is not the only one desperate to find Mirjana. Her current boyfriend Zoli, whose love for Mirjana borders on obsession, tries to kidnap Lucas from an Eastern Orthodox Christmas Eve celebration at Great-grandfather’s farm and then burns down Great-grandfather’s sacred pear tree that he brought with him from Slovenia. As Lucas hunts for clues to his mother’s whereabouts, Zoli turns increasingly menacing in his frantic pursuit. The level of violence escalates. Zoli almost kills Jimmy’s best friend Marko when Marko takes the blame for burning down Zoli’s house, a fire he knows Lucas started. But despite arson and beatings, the novel’s primary mood is sorrow. Memories of life before Jimmy’s death offer a vivid counterpoint to the unhappy present, especially as Great-grandfather’s health fails and Lucas learns the sad truth that Mirjana is not in California as Slats has implied, but has committed herself into a local mental hospital. Seliy brings the dying working class town of Banning into sharp relief. She captures its bleak everyday rhythm punctuated by weddings, funerals and mining disasters, and she creates a population of characters, including Zoli—in a lesser novel he would be pure villain—heart-wrenching in their sense of loss and capacity for love.

Deeply felt and written with immaculate care to create a fictional world that feels truly lived in.

Pub Date: May 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-59691-350-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.