A bit short on narrative energy, but appealingly warmhearted; readers will empathize with the endearing characters and want...
Unmoored by catastrophe, a father takes his daughter and dog to sea in this gentle novel from Orange Prize finalist Roffey (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, 2011, etc.).
It’s been almost a year since a disastrous flood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, drowned Gavin’s infant son. His wife, Claire, retreated into speechlessness and nearly constant sleep; she is staying with her mother while Gavin and their 6-year-old daughter, Océan, have returned to their rebuilt home. But Gavin keeps falling asleep at work, and Océan sobs for whole nights. They can’t get over their losses in a house filled with memories, Gavin decides; he boards his boat Romany with Océan and their dog Suzy, determined to fulfill his youthful dream of visiting the Galapagos Islands. As they sail west toward the Panama Canal, stops along the way at various islands give Roffey the opportunity to make some pointed observations about wealthy tourists, and she draws a quiet parallel between the legacy of colonialism and her characters’ emotional state: “Recovery takes time; it is the story of the still emerging Caribbean.” Gavin worries at first, as both Océan and Suzy retch with seasickness while he struggles to guide Romany through a squall, that he’s made a terrible mistake; ongoing references to Moby-Dick underscore the sea’s capacity to inflict harm, as does a shipboard fall that leaves Océan with a nasty wound. Island doctors stitch up her leg, and we see father and daughter slowly reawakening to happiness as they experience tranquil days amid the natural beauty of the Caribbean. But the departure of Phoebe, a young woman hired to help with the three-day sail over open seas to Cartegena, reanimates Océan’s anguish over her mother’s abandonment, and father and daughter must endure one more bereavement before their journey ends.
A bit short on narrative energy, but appealingly warmhearted; readers will empathize with the endearing characters and want them to have a happy ending.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-14-312256-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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