A serious if sometimes-overgrown farm tale.
Piety, pugnacity, and secrets shape the lives of a rural Welsh family across 70 years.
Bullough’s fourth novel and first published in the United States is mainly centered on Oliver, who is born in 1941 to Idris and Etty, two homesteaders whose lives appear to be simply circumscribed by their farm and church. As Oliver grows older, though, problems emerge: Idris struggles to keep the farm solvent, his estranged brother has his eye on the property, and Oliver’s youthful interest in boxing expands to a more wide-ranging interest in fisticuffs. Past secrets come up, too—Idris’ grim, no-nonsense demeanor stems from the agonies of his service in World War I, and there’s a secret about Oliver’s past that Etty has hidden as well. As Oliver grows older and becomes a father himself, Bullough means to explore the ways that tensions are passed from one generation to the next. At times that message is communicated opaquely, though. Bullough’s consistent use of Welsh dialect is at once colorful and something of a stumbling block: “sclem,” “mawn,” “mimmockin,” “pwntrel,” “lattermath,” and “addlands” itself, the edge of a ploughland. (Bullough’s website has a glossary.) And the overall fecundity of the prose—Bullough delivers plenty of longueurs about the landscape—can swallow up his characters’ tensions. But as progress stumbles on—church buildings are torn down in 1996, livestock succumbs to foot-and-mouth in 2001—Etty’s and Oliver’s sheer endurance is plainspoken and admirable, even if that endurance has an ironic cast. When Oliver is told that his son’s mother (a disappointingly underdrawn character) has written an important work of “post-pastoral poetry,” Oliver retorts: “Post-pastoral? We in’t done yet.”
A serious if sometimes-overgrown farm tale.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9872-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.
In Beartown, where the people are as "tough as the forest, as hard as the ice," the star player on the beloved hockey team is accused of rape, and the town turns upon itself.
Swedish novelist Backman’s (A Man Called Ove, 2014, etc.) story quickly becomes a rich exploration of the culture of hockey, a sport whose acolytes see it as a violent liturgy on ice. Beartown explodes after rape charges are brought against the talented Kevin, son of privilege and influence, who's nearly untouchable because of his transcendent talent. The victim is Maya, the teenage daughter of the hockey club’s much-admired general manager, Peter, another Beartown golden boy, a hockey star who made it to the NHL. Peter was lured home to bring winning hockey back to Beartown. Now, after years of despair, the local club is on the cusp of a championship, but not without Kevin. Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. Despite his love for hockey, where fights are part of the game, Peter hates violence. Kira, his wife, is an attorney with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners demeanor. Minor characters include Sune, "the man who has been coach of Beartown's A-team since Peter was a boy," whom the sponsors now want fired. There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor: the club president’s table manners are so crude "you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating." Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction.
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6076-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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