Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.
Tales of love, lust, and country life by the gifted Irish writer.
It’s spring or summer in western Ireland in most of these 11 stories. The whitethorn—or hawthorn, which helps the heart, say herbalists—may be “decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding.” And love appears throughout, romantic, familial, injurious, magical, morbid. A man drives away his lover for the painfully familiar reason that he can’t imagine “what kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me.” A young woman who targets a man to take her virginity before she returns to boarding school feels a new sense of power when he is run out of town. A man inherits a cottage that seems to make him irresistible to women, but while he’s Don Juan under that roof, “elsewhere I was, as ever, a bag of spanners.” A collector of old western Irish songs is startled by one in which a married woman seduces a herdsman so she can regale her husband with descriptions of her victim’s besotted state. A pregnant 17-year-old waits in a van while her fiance is supposedly off robbing a gas station to finance their elopement, but here “the whitethorn blossom…made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind.” Barry has the right stuff for short stories. He brings characters to life quickly and then blesses them with his uncanny ear for dialogue and prose rhythms, his compassion and wry wit. Most intriguing is one that opens with a dead whitethorn and has Theodore Roethke in an Irish psychiatric hospital (as he was in 1960), bantering with an earnest doctor while the poet’s mordant interior monologue adds a subtext on madness and creativity.
Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54033-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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