An eloquent, affecting take on pedophilia.
This complex quasi-mystery centers on a former cop’s reckoning with the damage caused by sexually abusive priests.
The narrator is Tom Kettle, a 66-year-old widower living in Dalkey, Ireland. He’s nine months into retirement from a decorated career with the Dublin police when two Garda officers ask him to look at reports from an old unsolved murder case he worked on years earlier. A priest under investigation for pedophilia has made disturbing accusations regarding the murderer. Kettle, whose wife and two adult children suffered brutal deaths in the previous 10 years, is already coping with too many memories, unwanted and otherwise. Much of the narrative is a very accessible stream of consciousness. Even as Kettle's mind drifts, he also must deal with the hard realities that arise from police procedure, like evidence gathering, interviews at headquarters, and the suspicions of his former boss. The unsolved case crucially turns his thoughts to the first night of his honeymoon and his wife’s “sorrowful revelations” of childhood abuse: “The rapes, the bloody priests.” It’s her abuser who was murdered. The novel avoids any pat responses to questions of crime and punishment, although even the dutiful cop in Kettle leans toward rough justice where the young are involved. Barry is a resourceful Irish writer with a gift for empathy and lyrical prose. Many of his novels weave Irish immigrants into the broader tapestry of global history in the past two centuries. But Kettle’s story hinges on domestic events, on years of priests’ sexual abuse of children in Ireland. Barry’s tight focus on one retired lawman and the ghosts bedeviling him provides a compelling sense of the misery the Catholic Church knew it was causing and failed to salve.
An eloquent, affecting take on pedophilia.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593296103
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
