Novels such as this extensively researched and passionate polemic are not necessarily art, but, like Sinclair Lewis’ The...
A day at a Mississippi abortion clinic unfurls backward as a self-appointed avenging angel wreaks havoc.
Picoult’s latest takes the unusual tack of proceeding in reverse. At 5 p.m., the Center, Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic, is awash in blood as Hugh McElroy, a Jackson police negotiator, is still bargaining with George Goddard, the deranged gunman who has occupied the Center for hours. Five hostages have been released, two gravely wounded: Hugh’s sister, Bex, and Dr. Louie Ward, the Center’s surgeon (whom, according to her author’s note, Picoult based on the outspoken abortion provider Dr. Willie Parker). One person inside is dead, and Hugh is still waiting for word of his teenage daughter, Wren, who had gone to the Center for a prescription for birth control pills, accompanied by her aunt Bex. As the day moves backward, several voices represent a socio-economic cross-section of the South; a few are on the front lines of the anti-abortion vs. abortion-rights war—but most are merely seeking basic women’s health care. Olive, 68, is at the Center for a second opinion; Janine, an anti-abortion activist, is there to spy; Joy is seeking an abortion; and Izzy is pregnant and conflicted. George wants revenge—his daughter recently had an abortion. A third father-daughter story runs parallel to the hostage crisis: A teenager named Beth, hospitalized for severe bleeding, is being prosecuted for murder after having taken abortifacient drugs she'd ordered online at 16 weeks pregnant. At times, Picoult defaults to her habitual sentimentality, particularly in describing the ties that bind Hugh, Wren, and Bex. This novel is unflinching, however, in forcing readers to witness the gory consequences of a mass shooting, not to mention the graphic details of abortions at various stages of gestation and the draconian burdens states like Mississippi have placed on a supposed constitutional right. For Dr. Ward, an African-American, “the politics of abortion” have “so much in common with the politics of racism.” The Times Arrow– or Benjamin Button–like backward structure adds little except for those ironic tinges hindsight always provides.
Novels such as this extensively researched and passionate polemic are not necessarily art, but, like Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle, they are necessary.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-345-54498-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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"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
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