Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.
O’Leary offers two intimate novellas set in Ireland, separated by half a century.
The first novella, “An Unspoken Peace,” focuses on Conor Fenney, a young Irish American man from Chicago who yearns to connect with his ancestors’ past. In 1969, Conor attends summer school at Trinity College, where he meets his rakish, well-to-do roommate, Aidan. What results is a chronicle of concealed queer desire and grief that blurs the contours of male companionship, interspersed with detailed gestures toward Irish histories and landscapes. Fifty years later, in 2019, an unnamed, aging man in “The Galway Girl” returns to Ireland to visit the Cliffs of Moher following the death of his wife of 45 years. There he meets Brooke, a 33-year-old American woman training to be a counselor for “young people with addiction issues.” The two form an unlikely, quiet connection bounded by their limited time together as they travel through Galway for a single day. These are simple, straightforward stories that present tender moments of human connection. However, the prose is often monotonous and unvaried; the narration lacks nuance, turning something as simple as “warm stew...weak on the meat, but strong on potatoes” into Conor’s unchallenged speculation that “the cook was trying to make up for all the years the potatoes failed the Irish.” Most interestingly, the collection immediately establishes a tenuous connection between the two novellas, the first noting from its very beginning that Conor was 17 when he first visited Ireland and still reminisces about his encounter 50 years later. Meanwhile, the aging male character in “The Galway Girl” remarks that he “went to Trinity College in Dublin for a summer session right out of high school,” just as Conor does in “An Unspoken Peace.” Although there’s little elaboration upon the connections between Conor and his ostensible older self, it is perhaps this blank space between the two novellas that rings most painfully true to life—much goes unspoken, and much comes undone.
Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.Pub Date: March 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-1733534147
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Swan Creek Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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