Forget the shaky plot. What’s memorable is the masterful use of Brandon as a bridge between the human world, foolish and...
Tensions on the U.S.-Canadian border disrupt a neighborhood in Lynch’s entertaining second novel (The Highest Tide, 2005).
Only a ditch separates one part of British Columbia from Washington State; it’s narrow enough for prickly, left-wing Canadian Wayne Rousseau to exchange insults with his American neighbor, Norm Vanderkool. A retired professor with MS, Wayne makes use of a legal remedy: smoking cannabis. The more conventional Norm is a dairy farmer with sick cows and a wife losing her memory. Both men have interesting children. Madeline Rousseau, running wild since her mother’s death, has started growing bud indoors for Canadian kingpin Toby, but it’s her erstwhile school friend Brandon Vanderkool who’s the star of the show, towering over the other characters literally (he’s 6’8”) and figuratively. Dyslexic 23-year-old Brandon has a hard time with people but an amazing affinity for animals and birds, his passion. Pushed into joining the Border Patrol by Norm, he barely passed the test (he’s a lousy shot), but once on the job he’s a sensation. Starting with a spectacular flying tackle of two hapless border-crossers, Brandon makes bust after bust of illegals and drug smugglers, seemingly without effort. Lynch presents a three-ring circus. In ring number one, the BP agents. Number two, the Canadian growers and smugglers. In the third ring, the Americans on the border, mostly dairy farmers tempted by easy money for letting smugglers cross their property. The action (there’s plenty of it) is shot through with wry humor and intermittent suspense. Brandon remains an innocent, albeit “an innocent who’s bad for business,” as Toby says darkly. Guns are in evidence. Maddy deceives the trusting, lovestruck Brandon about her involvement. We seem headed for a major, possibly tragic confrontation, but it doesn’t happen, and the story slowly deflates.
Forget the shaky plot. What’s memorable is the masterful use of Brandon as a bridge between the human world, foolish and chaotic, and the more ordered universe of birds.Pub Date: June 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27117-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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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