A wrenching exploration of the consequences of survival.
In the aftermath of an environmental apocalypse, a family must make a terrible decision, the consequences of which will reverberate through the rest of their lives.
In French author Collette’s (Nothing but Dust, 2018) second book translated into English, half the world has been erased. For as far as 11-year-old Louie can see, the once-familiar valleys, towns, and even the closest neighbors have been inundated with water, the result of an apocalyptic tidal wave that has left him, his parents, and his eight siblings stranded on an island that used to be merely the top of a hill. At first the family’s survival seems miraculous, but the waters are still rising, and, as the land they perch on shrinks and resources become scarce, the parents know they must seek higher ground or risk drowning. The father estimates that with 12 days of hard rowing they can reach an area likely to still be above water, but, with only one boat, there will not be enough room to carry all the children and all the supplies they will need to survive the dangerous passage. The parents must make the devastating choice of whom to leave behind and settle on the three middle children, Louie, Perrine, and Noah, intending to return for them as soon as they reach land. At this point the narrative splits. On the island, the three children—ages 11 to 8—struggle with the implications of their abandonment as their supplies dwindle and the water continues to rise. On the boat, the siblings and the parents grapple with the consequences of their new identities as, alternatively, the ones who were chosen and the ones who were forced to choose. In tense, tightly controlled, and genuinely devastating prose, Collette explores the existential dilemma of pitting the good of the many against the good of the few with both nuance and great linguistic beauty. In a time when families across the globe are being forced to make very similar choices due to war, forced migration, and the depredations of climate change, Collette’s evocation of the human reality of this philosophical logic puzzle is a timely and fiercely excoriating narrative.
A wrenching exploration of the consequences of survival.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-567-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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