A rare novel that focuses its attention on the difficulties of repairing adult friendships, with a fun setting and a bold...
Poet and short story writer Glaser's (MOODS, 2013, etc.) debut novel tells the story of a passionate friendship between two art students.
In their small New England college town, Paulina's and Fran's lives are a whirlwind of art critiques, seduction, gossip, thrift shopping, and dance parties. Paulina, an imposing narcissist, claims talented but meek Fran as the only acceptable company when her crush no-shows for the art department trip to Norway. After bonding with Paulina in museums, hotel rooms, and on the streets of Oslo, Fran and Paulina spend "so much time together without getting sick of each other, it was inspiring." The unlikely pair's matching curly hair seems to be all they have in common. When they return to campus, the new friendship between them shakes up all their relationships, romantic and otherwise, but Paulina's affected detachment is tested when her ex, Julian, takes up with Fran. That betrayal ends the women's friendship but not their intense feelings for each other. They coexist on campus, always thinking of each other. Throughout the book, humor comes from vivid characterization, cutting dialogue, and absurd inner monologues. Paulina intones a mantra, "I love myself I love myself I love myself," to build her confidence and cuts friends down with verbal swords: "You sound like a malfunctioning hair dryer." Initially, the intensely insular world of art school relationships feels too small to drive a novel, but Glaser widens the scope to show her characters navigating the ebb and flow of friendship as they grow into adulthood.
A rare novel that focuses its attention on the difficulties of repairing adult friendships, with a fun setting and a bold cast of characters to lighten the mood.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237734-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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