Foos effortlessly inserts a humanized sin-eater into the center of a complex, emotionally volatile group of families,...
In Foos' sixth novel, a mysteriously pigmented girl in a small lakeside town serves as the focal point for the unraveling of three families, as told from the perspectives of the women and their daughters who surreptitiously feed the girl moon pies.
Three mothers, Magda, Libby, and Irene, and their respective teenagers, Caroline, Rebecca, and Audrey, are marooned not just in a tourist-reliant lakeside town, but in the stasis of lives unlived: "We kept them close to us on the beach towels and watched them slather themselves in oil." The women's marriages are studies in abandonment, either of the professional variety (Libby's husband, Jeff, who absents himself in order to avoid their autistic, quasi-violent teenage son, Ethan) or the mental one (Irene's husband, Colin, who one day stopped speaking and now throws a nerf ball against the living room walls all day). Rebecca is fooling around with Magda's son, Greg, a liaison the teens think is secret but is known to all. The near-drowning of the town's so-called "Blue Girl" and her subsequent rescue by Audrey breaks the stasis of the families by giving them a fresh outlet for their pity. But how many moon pies can one girl, blue or not, eat? The blue girl never assumes a proper name but instead remains with her moniker throughout the book in order to become a fleshy catalyst for long-repressed pain. With spare prose and a keen ear for the clipped interactions of people in denial ("He slips out of the house in the morning and into the bed at night without a coffee ground in the sink or a crease in the bedspread"), Foos untangles the troublesome knot that binds the families together one kinked strand at a time.
Foos effortlessly inserts a humanized sin-eater into the center of a complex, emotionally volatile group of families, creating a work that is haunting and healing in equal measure.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56689-399-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2015
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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
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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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