Eschewing flashy verbal fireworks, Yarbrough has written a deeply intelligent and wildly moving story about the many...
Having plumbed the moral complexities of his native Mississippi (Safe From The Neighbors, 2010, etc.), Yarbrough takes a risk in moving his focus to a New England town where a middle-aged married couple has relocated from California.
Kristin has a Ph.D. in comparative literature but hasn’t read a serious book in years. Her husband, Cal, who is haunted by his father’s criminality and his own capacity for violence, plays a variety of musical instruments but refuses to call himself a musician. For 15 years, Kristin and Cal have lived together in lukewarm companionability, keeping their secrets from each other, but by 2010, the recession has cost 50-year-old Kristin her administrative job at a prestigious California university and closed down Cal’s high-end construction business. So when a third-tier state college in Massachusetts offers Kristin a job at half her old salary, she and Cal don’t hesitate to move, hoping the change will reactivate their marriage as well as their finances. While Kristin begins work at North Shore State College, Cal starts to renovate the old house they’ve purchased in Montvale, a train ride away from her office. Kristin soon meets a younger, surprisingly literate neighbor, Matt. A Montvale native who works at the counter of a loyal friend’s local deli, Matt lost both his wife and his career after he was caught embezzling from his employer, a Cambridge bookstore, to support his cocaine habit. A broken man, Matt remains dependent on literature; having been dumped by her professorial first husband, Kristin long ago abandoned literature. Their affair is inevitable. Yet Cal’s love for Kristin shows surprising tenacity. There are no villains here, only characters struggling to make sense of their lives and connect, however imperfectly, with others. Even the side plot, about a plagiarism scandal in North Shore State’s history department, slips beyond satirical academia bashing into a complex study of ethical choice.
Eschewing flashy verbal fireworks, Yarbrough has written a deeply intelligent and wildly moving story about the many permutations of love, betrayal and redemption.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-34950-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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