Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks.
A finely detailed debut collection of stories set in Canada from the 1960s to the present.
Alward often begins in a sharply evoked past time and then swoops forward into the present to record the impact of a past experience on her characters. In the brief and evocative title story, she opens in the seemingly familiar territory of a party in the 1970s that is being observed by children exiled upstairs while “the grownups put on their party clothes and seemed to forget us.” In her bedroom, the narrator, 10 or 11 at the time, is visited by one of her parents’ friends, and what might have gone horribly wrong doesn’t only because her brother appears at the door. Decades later, her parents divorced, the narrator finds herself inexplicably seeking this man “in beer cellars and dance halls and country-and-western bars.” Two of the stories view a similarly splintered nuclear family from radically different angles. In “Old Growth,” Gwyneth takes a road trip with her ex-husband, Ray, to check out some land he intends to buy, while in “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier but appearing later in the collection, Ray, in the family cabin soon to be sold, spends the summer with his troubled teenage son while a bear lurks nearby. Alward is a master of near disasters: “Bundle of Joy” starts out as a satire about a critical mother going for a visit to meet her infant grandson and complaining about the infant’s short legs and her son-in-law’s beard, which reminds her of “a neglected box hedge.” As grandma Ruth consumes ever more alcohol, the story veers into an account of an accident involving the child and then takes an unexpected turn into sympathy for Ruth. With a coolly dispassionate voice, Alward views the small horrors of domesticity, “the ungodly screech of the Fisher-Price phone as its bulbous eyes rolled back” or the creaking strain on a marriage inflicted by the necessity of removing six layers of wallpaper, and turns them into stories whose implications reverberate far beyond the walls of any home.
Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965620
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.
The discovery that a revered artist’s sculpture contains a human bone sets off scandal and violence.
Art historian James Becker has what seems like a sweet deal. He’s the curator of the collection of the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family: Sebastian, Becker’s best friend, and his bitter mother, Lady Emmeline. Becker’s wife, Helena, was Sebastian’s fiancee first, but they’re all very civilized about it and happily awaiting the birth of her baby. The centerpiece of the Fairburn collection is works by the late Vanessa Chapman, an artist about whom Becker wrote his thesis, and with whom he is somewhat obsessed. Partly, it’s because of her great talent, but she was also a glamorous figure, a beauty who, as she became successful, sequestered herself on an isolated Scottish tidal island called Eris. She had a dark side—lots of stormy relationships, plus a philandering mooch of a husband who vanished without a trace a few decades ago. Her reputation, though, has risen after her death—so much so that the Fairburn has loaned some of her works to the Tate Modern. That’s where a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. The scientist is sure the bone is human, and soon Becker finds himself scrambling to prevent scandal. Vanessa willed her works and papers to the foundation, but some of them are still on Eris, guarded by her longtime friend Grace Haswell. A retired doctor, Grace lived with Vanessa off and on over the years and nursed her through her fatal cancer. It was a surprise when Vanessa left her estate not to Grace but to Douglas Lennox, Emmeline’s husband and Sebastian’s father. Douglas was Vanessa’s gallerist and lover, but the two had a nasty falling-out. Sebastian is so frustrated by Grace’s refusal to turn over all of the bequest that he’s ready to sue her, but Becker believes he can negotiate, so off to the the island he goes. He finds far more treachery and shocking secrets than he expected, past and present alike. Hawkins keeps her cast tight, her wild setting ominous, and her plot moving fast.
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396524
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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