Though the forced, contrived plot almost submerges the novel, the sensuous apprehension of a distant, perilous, ineffably...
A vigorous picture of life near “James Bay in the Arctic Lowlands of Ontario” distinguishes this second novel from the Canadian-born author (Three Day Road, 2005).
The book, which was awarded Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, begins unevenly, with a setup much too reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: a history “dreamed” by Cree Indian bush pilot Will Bird, as he lies comatose in a hospital bed, and juxtaposed with the story recalled by Will’s niece Annie, keeping a vigil beside him, of her southward journey to seek her missing younger sister Suzanne, a runaway who became a successful fashion model and “party girl.” Boyden ends it even more awkwardly, with a semi-surprising disclosure about a crime that still pursues Will, and a concluding reconciliation that’s improbable and sentimental. Between these extremes, the book is frequently energized by visionary splendor and raw emotional force. Annie is a fantastically observed character. A tough, vibrant woman, she’s sustained by an increasingly loving relationship with her withdrawn “protector” Gordon and is unafraid to enter the worlds of narcotic and sexual excess that appear to have claimed Suzanne. Alas, the Manhattan scenes too often read like inert chick lit. Fortunately, the story is redeemed by Boyden’s rich portrayal of the stoical Will, most fully realized in a subtly fragmented account of Will’s arduous stay on a remote island (Akimiski), where wind and weather stalk him as relentlessly as do his old enemies—and his only companions are an elderly settler couple who seem to possess an almost mystical knowledge of his history, marauding polar bears and, in a brilliantly resonating image, a whale skeleton that washed up out of the bay.
Though the forced, contrived plot almost submerges the novel, the sensuous apprehension of a distant, perilous, ineffably beautiful world draws us in and won’t let us go.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02057-7
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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