The exposition is cumbersome, and the denouement devolves into slapstick, in DeAngelis’s uneven debut.
Geneticist clones her own grandmother.
Lucy and Gray, lovers and professors at fictitious New Halcyon University in Massachusetts, share a rambling manse with five male student boarders, all members of a religious cult. The house features all manner of arcana, including a backyard labyrinth, an attic filled with the vintage wardrobe of Lucy’s grandmother Mary and a basement containing equipment that both Lucy and Ambrose, her late biologist father, have used for “projects” that have lately attracted unwanted attention from the conservative religious element on campus. Longing to reproduce, Lucy decides on a radical form of do-it-yourself in-vitro. Injecting DNA from a bloodstained apron found in Mary’s attic into an ovum harvested by Ambrose from Lucy’s deceased mother Lucinda, Lucy implants herself with the resulting zygote, which develops much faster than a conventional fetus, necessitating a late-night Caesarian performed by Lucy’s colleague, Megan, in the basement. After a few months gestation in the cellar “sinwomb,” Ambrose’s electric-powered synthetic uterine chamber, a new Mary is “born.” Due to her cell age at the time of cloning, Mary is 22 years old, with memories of the 1920s intact. The usual anachronistic follies ensue: Mary finds the language, dress and inflation of the 2000s unsettling, but is pleased to see that Prohibition is over and that she can still smoke Luckies. A helpful book, Everyday Life in the Twenty-first Century, by a mysterious time-traveler (or hoaxer), brings Mary up to date on everything from neocons to the genetic science that produced her. Gray, enamored of Mary, can’t prevent Lucy from cloning Mary’s husband Teddy, who died in 1944 at age 36. Before long, the local evangelist threatens Lucy with prosecution and murder. He settles for vague threats, leaving just enough time for Lucy to send her creations off toward Mary’s dream destination, Antarctica. A disillusioned Lucy will discover the full extent of her father’s prescient gene-wrangling.
The exposition is cumbersome, and the denouement devolves into slapstick, in DeAngelis’s uneven debut.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35258-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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