Despite a tendency to dwell on emotional explanations, Foley delivers a compelling tale.
A debut novel that uses the world of dreams to upend the life of an otherwise ordinary housewife.
Since Rose was 6 years old she has dreamed every night of the same place: a magical island on which the only other person is a boy named Hugo. In her dreams, Hugo and Rose grow into adults at the same rate that Rose grows in real life, but everything else on the island stays much the same, and they adventure blissfully together each time she sleeps. But by the time Rose is a mother with three small children and a surgeon husband who is rarely home, she starts to resent her waking life. On the island, she's still svelte, energetic, and happy—her best self. At home, she's overweight, overworked, and overtired. On a particularly rough day, when nothing is going well, she chances upon Hugo in the real world. Like Rose, this version of Hugo bears the markings of real life—he is older, paunchy, and has glasses. But Rose knows it’s him and soon he knows it’s her, as well. The two discover that the dreams have been shared all along. A more pastoral-minded author might take this twist in its obvious, romantic direction, but Foley makes it clear that there will be no easy way out of this surprising clash of lives; both Rose’s dreams and her waking life take on dark, unsettling elements. None of the adults in this book—Hugo, Rose, or Rose’s husband, Josh—behave particularly thoughtfully or well, which contributes high drama but makes them difficult to root for. Rose, especially, is a character that things happen to, even on the island, and her lack of agency is frustrating. But the island itself is a strikingly believable dreamscape, and the passages that take place there have a satisfying flavor.
Despite a tendency to dwell on emotional explanations, Foley delivers a compelling tale.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05579-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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