A mildly uplifting tale full of pleasant imagery, but could have packed more punch.
O’Leary’s debut is a young adult novel about a small town family dealing with the effects of war and tragedy.
Younger brother Cody is the star quarterback and his older brother Boomer is the offensive lineman charged with protecting Cody on the field. Their personalities reflect their on-field duties; Cody is thoughtful and puts pressure on himself while Boomer likes to hit things, not out of anger but for the thrill of contact. The reader can easily picture the pair driving around O’Leary’s old-fashioned Grand Rapids, Ohio, as autumn leaves scuttle across the sidewalk. The author has created likable characters and drawn an engaging portrait of an idyllic American town. The scenery is beautiful, and O’Leary excels at pulling the reader into the setting. The book comes to life in simple scenes such as Cody and his girlfriend Kim playing flashlight tag with their teenage friends in a corn maze. When Boomer makes a life-altering decision to serve with the military in Iraq after his senior year in high school, it’s a natural progression for his character. Indeed, every character fits neatly into the story and plays a part in the larger narrative. O’Leary’s tale is efficient in that way, but this can also make things feel perfunctory; things fall into place a bit too easily, and there are places where the author avoids delving into the conflict in a moment. When Kim visits Boomer in the hospital, the chapter ends just as the two begin a meaningful, telling interaction. A similar situation occurs shortly thereafter when Kim wants to take Boomer’s picture, and he balks and later when Cody tells his brother’s story at a school assembly. O’Leary sets up great moments but stops short of playing them out in the text. These dramatic moments are where the meat of the story is, but the narrative just fills in the action later on. This is part of O’Leary’s approach to a difficult subject, and it helps avoid turning the book into a polemic. But this also robs the narrative of some of its dramatic impact.
A mildly uplifting tale full of pleasant imagery, but could have packed more punch.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0975321614
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Swan Creek
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
A good beach read, set in a beach town.
A fast-paced novel about the enduring friendship of three young women who spent their summers in Avalon on the Jersey shore before dispersing across the country.
The book opens with Kate, now a lawyer in the girls’ original hometown of Philadelphia. Kate’s fiance, a man she met in law school, breaks up with her the same day she learns she is pregnant with their baby. Then we meet Vanessa, now living in New York City. Vanessa has given up her career as an art dealer in the city to raise her daughter Lucy and is struggling with her husband’s confession that he recently came close to cheating on her. Then we meet Dani, an aspiring novelist who has just lost her job in a bookstore in San Francisco. Dani is still dealing with drug and alcohol addictions and is still looking for Mr. Right. When the three decide to get together and spend the 4th of July holiday back in Avalon, they are each haunted by memories of Kate’s twin brother, Colin, who tragically drowned there eight years earlier when they were all on the cusp of adulthood. Woven into the mystery of Colin’s demise are other issues of childhood that influenced each of the young women. As they look back on the painful past and flirt with future opportunities, the women finally share the secrets they had kept all those years, forgive one another and prepare themselves to move on in positive ways.
A good beach read, set in a beach town.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220381-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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