Superb entertainment: some of the characterizations are superficial, but what counts is the warmhearted celebration of New...
Rinaldi (The Jukebox Queen of Malta, 1999, etc.) takes a familiar narrative model—the interlocking lives of residents in a Manhattan apartment building—and gives it some bright new plumage.
Echo Terrace, a glitzy condo close by the Twin Towers, is aptly named, for the building is clamorous with ghosts as the story begins in 1992. Romanian concierge Farro Fescu has never recovered from the loss of his uncle to German bombs during WWII; celebrity quiltmaker Maggie Sowle mourns the death of her man Henry; and so on. But if the past looms large, the present sizzles with (melo)drama, including a murder and two suicides. Two episodes are especially gripping. The first (drama) is the terrifying rape of the pretty housemaid Yesenia on a subway ride; the second (melodrama) is the appearance of two rogue FBI agents, who hustle cosmetic surgeon Theo Tattafruge to a deserted country cottage to perform a sex-change operation on a henchman of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In two of the more gentle sequences, Westernized Iraqi Abdul Saad woos actress Angela Crespi by covering her foyer in rose petals, while his father Muhta has a decorous affair with Maggie. Rinaldi sets time and mortality in opposition to his characters’ desires, not just for sex but for children (Theo), for artistic perfection (Maggie), desire to be grounded by talismans (a tribal canoe, a bearskin linked to Teddy Roosevelt), and for more money, period (Luther Rumfarm, the villain of the piece). The residents are shaken by the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, and the attacks of 9/11 provide the novel’s climactic horror, which could scarcely be better told but inevitably dwarfs the characters. Only Fescu stands up to the tragedy, defying a cop’s order to leave in order to serve as the building’s lonely sentinel.
Superb entertainment: some of the characterizations are superficial, but what counts is the warmhearted celebration of New Yorkers and their restless curiosity.Pub Date: June 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-057876-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
