Despite its apparent departures from her mold, this ends up as one of Weldon's most characteristic fairy tales, with the...
Our preeminent fictional chronicler of the war between men and women takes a break to report on the state of battles between continents, generations, past and present.
Or so at first it seems when Sophia King, whose knowledge of life is based on the films she's edited, gets an imperious phone call from her grandmother, Felicity Bax, demanding that Sophia help Felicity sell her house in Connecticut and find a living situation more suitable for a person of her advancing years. For Sophia, orphaned, unmarried, and unloved but for the intermittent embraces of preoccupied director Harry Krassner, the summons is a call to arms—an invitation to confront her dead, insane mother Angel, her own dereliction in failing to rush to Felicity's bedside during an earlier medical emergency, and the brave new world of America, which Weldon is visiting for the first time. As unquenchable Felicity, aided by Sophia, the I Ching, and her fractious New England neighbor Joy, plows ahead on the new adventure of locating new digs, settling into the plush, sinister Golden Bowl Complex ("a CIA training ground for surveillance techniques and psychological warfare"), and embarking on a December-November love affair with an alarmingly incorrigible gambler, Sophia burrows more deeply into her family history, and soon shakes loose relatives she had never known about. But Felicity's escapades and Sophia's investigations alike reveal a familiar cast of villains—uncaring patriarchs, conniving mistresses, self-justifying parasites of both sexes—whose selfishness, greed, and cruelty Weldon's joyously caustic cadences hammer as they frolic and tickle the humorously humane readers she invites us to be.
Despite its apparent departures from her mold, this ends up as one of Weldon's most characteristic fairy tales, with the novelist (Big Girls Don't Cry, 1998, etc.) pressed once more into the role of the fairy godmother who'll rescue her heroines from the plots swirling perhaps a little too generously about them.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-775-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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.
