DINOSAURS ON OTHER PLANETS

Name: DINOSAURS ON OTHER PLANETS
Author: Danielle S. McLaughlin
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9842-9

by Danielle S. McLaughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

There is no weakest link in this powerful set of stories—all the characters are given space and time for their stories to...

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Irish short story writer McLaughlin’s debut collection is a treat for American readers.

Written in clear, simple prose, these 11 stories focus on the potent imagery and the powerful emotions floating beneath the surface of seemingly mundane lives. Each story effectively mines the specific for a universal payoff. The first story, “The Art of Foot-Binding,” explores an unhappy wife and mother’s domestic angst through the prism of her daughter’s history project. In “All About Alice,” a 45-year-old woman who spends days tending to her elderly father goes looking for adventure and finds herself unable to keep a lid on the secrets of her younger years. McLaughlin is at her best when demonstrating contrasts among everyday images. Kevin, the main character of “Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate,” feels his “missing flask like a phantom limb” while perusing his neighbor Bob Miller’s military memorabilia collection in the midst of a neighborhood First Communion party, where little girls rush past as “a battalion of miniature brides, their white sandals clattering over the tiles.” The title story makes for a strong finish, when a mother and grandmother feels everyone she loves—spouse, children, grandchild—drifting further and further away. Isolated from the group after dinner one night, having insisted on doing all the cleanup herself, Kate’s view out the window includes three wind turbines, whose “red lights shone down from the mountain…a warning to aircraft.” Close at hand, her kitchen sink fills, and she watches “the bubble form psychedelic honeycombs, millions and millions of tiny domes, glittering on the dirty plates.” In McLaughlin’s world, the everyday has the same sparkle—or the same devastation—as a glittering galaxy or a war.

There is no weakest link in this powerful set of stories—all the characters are given space and time for their stories to build to rich conclusions.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9842-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.