A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.
In Keenan’s (The Origin and Applicability of Fighter Tactics, 1986) epic tale, a retired fighter pilot and football star, now an accomplished actor, returns to the town of his youth to seek answers and perhaps right wrongs of the past. But he’d better hurry: he only has one day to live.
Bishop Healey is having the worst day of his life. His balancing of faith and malevolence is challenged when boyhood friend Jack Cochran arrives and demands absolution years after killing his abusive father, a crime for which another man was punished. After meeting with Healey, Cochran undergoes life-threatening surgery and begins to tie up loose ends, finding enough rope to hang himself as well as a few others. As the secrets of numerous misplaced patrimonies are revealed and church abuses described, it soon becomes clear why others in search of justice or revenge also want an audience with his eminence. Healey knows where the bodies are buried and who put them there. In Keenan’s novel, the Catholic Church is taken to task on many accounts, but the flogging is never a penance for the reader. Moral temptations and mitigating arguments are as complicated as anything in John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions, and while this book stretches for the scope of Michener with flashbacks and back story, Keenan masterfully keeps the focus on men and women under stress. Readers see Cochran’s rough and tumble past and his career in Vietnam and how those events influenced him; unfortunately, we seeing nothing of his career as an award-winning actor, a garden that could have provided a rich harvest of iniquity. The narrative relies almost entirely on dialogue, which speeds exposition but does little to allow the world to be seen through the eyes of its characters.
A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-8664-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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