A sure bet.
A delightful fourth and final book about the rich, quirky life of 21-year-old college student Hallie Palmer.
When the story opens, Hallie is days away from donning graduation cap and gown to begin her post-college life when she discovers a clerical error has left her one social-sciences class short. Minutes later, she bumps into Josh, an old crush of hers who tells her she can get the course credit if she signs up with a sociology team (of which Josh is a part) to travel the world, dropping wallets containing $20 each, as part of a professor's doctoral study on humanity's global honesty. But if Hallie embarks on this globe-trotting mission, it will throw a jumbo-sized wrench into her plans to move in with her longtime boyfriend Craig and start work at her new job. However, for this small-town girl, the opportunity is too irresistible to refuse and just before she departs, a stung Craig bestows a free-spirit status on them both. While her journey is fraught with food poisoning, an earthquake and various assorted comical conundrums, Hallie must also try to remain in her professor's good graces as well as withstand life with her roommate Mandy, a Mennonite who suddenly morphs into a henna-tattooed siren on the second day of the journey. Wiser for her tribulations, Hallie returns home to her family with eight siblings, her hysterically funny gay friend, Bernard and his perpetually politically correct mother, Olivia, and Craig. What follows is a marvelous ending with a funny domino-like sequence of surprises for Hallie and others. Though the book can be found on young-adult shelves, the story is more than sufficiently sophisticated to grab adults as well. Literary and cultural references add a wonderful depth to the anecdotes and metaphors. The book’s laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will find themselves rereading lines just for the sheer joy of it. They may also find that going back to the preceding three books will prove to be irresistible.
A sure bet.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4401-6962-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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