A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.
Shame and miscommunication drive wedges between loving siblings at turning points in their lives.
The Irish American family of the title runs a successful pub bearing their name in a small New York town. They’re close-knit, but most of them keep shameful secrets from each other. Father Mickey worries he has dementia (and has never talked about his past Irish Republican Army connections); oldest son Denny is stressed because he’s about to open a second pub for which he has borrowed a lot of money via sketchy methods and because his wife has moved out. His brothers, artistic Jackie and Shane, who’s intellectually disabled but a hardworking bundle of energy, are both haunted by the abrupt and mysterious departure to California five years ago of their sister, Sunday. Now she’s home, recuperating from a drunken car wreck but enigmatic as ever, which is really stressing out Denny’s best friend and business partner, Kale Collins, who is also Sunday’s former fiance. He might have moved on to marriage and fatherhood, but the torch he carries for Sunday is hot enough to burn down both their houses. Lange builds the plot by switching to a different character’s point of view in each chapter, giving the reader angles on events that are sometimes intriguingly different. The Brennan men, including Kale, who pretty much grew up with them, rally around Sunday when she’s threatened, although they do have a touch of toxic masculinity, tending to think of violent revenge as a solution, and sometimes acting on it. The Brennan matriarch, Maura, has been dead for several years when the story begins, but her influence plays a surprising role. The Brennans find redemption, but Lange doesn’t wrap things up too neatly—some of those old secrets have new echoes.
A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-79622-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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