While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In...
When Valerie’s elderly aunt Charlotte goes missing, she must step in to take care of business at the old Ringelnatz & Co. bookstore.
Valerie’s life was on an orderly course until her aunt disappeared, leaving a note that simply said her niece was to manage affairs in her absence. The young woman had been attending business school and enjoyed decent-enough companionship with her boyfriend. When she arrives at Ringelnatz, the shop is a mess. Books are arranged haphazardly, and the accounting system’s nonexistent. There’s also a pregnant rat which oddly doesn’t seem to bother Valerie in the least. In time, she considers the rodent a dear friend, feeding and caring for it like a modern-day Disney princess. In his debut novel, German literary agent Montasser pens a love letter to literature in the form of this story of a bookseller with a magical ability to prescribe just the right book for each of her customers. And one mysterious book—which Valerie initially presumes is defective because of its missing pages—causes the young woman to question what is and is not possible both on and off the page. Through her interactions with customers and letters from satisfied readers, Valerie begins to see the charm amid chaos at Ringelnatz, thus challenging her to reflect on her own life. In a story set in a bookstore, references to authors and literature are to be expected, and this is no exception. But the name-dropping adds little, if anything, to the story. This anemic novel, translated from German, is told by a distant narrator who is sometimes poetic but more often pretentious.
While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In the end, it’s not so special.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-780-74866-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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