An accomplished debut.
In Alcott’s first novel, a young woman dissects a shattered relationship as she strives to understand the elements and emotions that have defined her life.
Throughout childhood, neighbors Ida and Jackson share an indivisible bond that can’t be penetrated, even by Jackson’s younger brother, James. They have that rare connection that sometimes forms between individuals, a tie so strong that the two breathe, eat, sleep and function almost as one. The boys’ mother and Ida’s guilt-ridden father (Ida’s mother died in a horrific fire while he was in an alcoholic stupor) maintain a friendship and quasi-family unit based on compatibility and necessity, and the children spend most of their time together. Jackson and James are somnambulists, and Ida is intrigued by their ability to converse in their sleep. As Jackson and Ida’s love evolves into a physical relationship, James struggles with drugs and mental illness, and the three contend with inevitable changes in the dynamics of their friendship. When Jackson strikes Ida in his sleep, she buys art supplies to divert his actions, and Jackson begins to produce amazing artwork—a feat that he can only accomplish while in a sleeping state. Against his wishes, Ida takes his work to an art gallery owner, who then arranges a public showing, and this ultimately signifies the end for the couple. The narrative, which begins after the breakup, expertly interweaves Ida’s current reflections with her introspection about past events, some simple and innocent, others complex and appalling: the circus wallpaper held together by tape in the boys’ bedroom; a toy Godzilla purchased by James at a garage sale; sexual exploration at an early age; the kidnapping of a neighborhood girl. All add dimension to each character and help establish the emotional depth of a well-told story.
An accomplished debut.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59051-529-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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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
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