An auspicious debut that blends a number of disparate-seeming tones into something surprisingly coherent—and moving.
Ferguson’s playful debut novel mixes a coming-of-age story with time travel.
“I feel like I should be changing,” 19-year-old Val says. Henry, her high school boyfriend, no longer seems like enough, so she ditches him and his best friend, Gabe, for life at NYU. Soon after, Henry disappears, leaving Gabe to search for him and also to reconcile his latent feelings for Val. But Ferguson doesn’t keep Henry’s whereabouts a secret: He's been abducted by older versions of himself—one at 80, one at 41. Henry can travel through time, see, and his older versions want to help him avoid mistakes, even if it means altering their own realities. Sound confusing, like a Charlie Kaufman–esque head trip? This plot summary makes the novel seem more difficult than it is. As Henry moves through time, Gabe and Val remain in place, and Ferguson gives equal weight to each point of view. In other words, though Henry’s story may be tricky, Ferguson never strays far from the anchor of the other two characters, a neat narrative maneuver that makes the novel not as confusing as it should be. Despite all the time travel, Ferguson’s core is a coming-of-age tale that takes the form of a love triangle; remove the fantasy, and you have a novel as old-fashioned as Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot (2011). But that’s not a bad thing—Ferguson never stresses the weirdness of his construction, focusing instead on convincingly realistic details so that even the surrealism seems earthbound. The novel never quite reaches the conclusion it deserves—Ferguson opts for mezzo piano when fortissimo would’ve been best—but no matter: This book, like good music, will sweep you up.
An auspicious debut that blends a number of disparate-seeming tones into something surprisingly coherent—and moving.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-32399-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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"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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