Rich and spicy, but an iffy plot and a little thick and slow to boil.
Award-winning Canadian author Coady’s US debut tells intertwined stories of unhappy adolescents—and unhappier adults—as their lives collide in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s.
Guy Boucher lives with his struggling-to-make-ends-meet mother, his older and mostly absent sister, and his all-too-present uncle Isadore in a rural French Canadian community outside the town of Big Harbour. Guy’s home life is a disaster. Isadore is an alcoholic bully whose new drinking pal is Guy’s English teacher, an American draft dodger. (Heavy drinking by the men here is a given and depressing constant except when they’re up at the monastery drying out.) At a dance in Big Harbour, where the Scots look down on the French, Guy meets a town girl, Corrine, who lets him dance with her five times. He pursues her with puppylike optimism, not quite picking up on her lack of interest, let alone disdain. In fact, Corrine has her own problems. Although pretty and popular, she has concocted an elaborate fantasy life complete with an older boyfriend to impress her peers, especially her sensitive, less popular friend Pam. Pam, distressed already by her father’s descent into alcoholism and joblessness, is distraught for Corrine, especially after she makes Guy sound like an obsessed stalker. Pam passes her fears for Corrine on to the even less popular, more desperate Ann. After Ann tells the gossip about Corrine to her brother, who happens to be attempting a friendship with Corrine’s own seriously troubled brother, the former high school golden boys go on a vengeful, indiscriminate rampage. Meanwhile, Guy’s mother moves with him into town to escape Isadore. Officially suspected though not exactly charged with molesting Corrine, Guy hides out with his now sober English teacher until the truth wins out.
Rich and spicy, but an iffy plot and a little thick and slow to boil.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-11976-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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