A keenly observed, compassionate, and absorbing work.
A novel that explores how societal expectations can make people hide their true selves.
In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1979, Margaret Carlyle graduates from high school and begins college with dreams of finding a great romance at Trinity College. However, in the spring of her freshman year, fellow student Anders Salisbury rapes her during their first date. Her close friend Fitz, who’s secretly in love with her, urges her to report the crime, but she refuses; she wants to simply ignore it and put it behind her. Years later, however, Anders becomes a famous movie star. The trauma of the incident causes Margaret to hide her true feelings from those closest to her, including Douglas, a thoroughly average high school teacher whom she eventually marries. Fitz is wealthy, privileged, and popular but also full of self-loathing due to anxiety over his weight. His father expects his son to follow him into the insurance business. However, he sympathizes too much with insurance claimants and feels “completely unsuited for the role he had been groomed from birth to play.” His secretary, Brenda, develops an intense crush on him, but she has her own secret. Schoenberger shows a great deal of sympathy and affection for her good-hearted and flawed major characters, and she relates their stories in matter-of-fact prose studded with pithy observational gems: A secretary “functions as a human alarm clock”; a socialite’s expensive spa treatments are “hush money she slipped to gravity and time.” The novel effectively examines love in all its forms—friendship, romance, unrequited longing, marriage, self-love, the love between parents and children—and what happens when people don’t believe themselves worthy of others’ love. In the end, the various players can only get what they deserve by speaking their own truths.
A keenly observed, compassionate, and absorbing work.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-130-4
Page Count: 337
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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