Aside from introducing a few contrived plot twists, Pancol deftly manages the constellation of characters in a cleareyed,...
As a knife accidentally slices into her wrist, Joséphine realizes she would be glad to simply slip away from her life.
At that moment, Joséphine understands that her husband, Antoine, will never find work. He’ll carry on with his mistress, and she’ll have to put food on the table. As a medieval historian, her financial prospects are slim. Out of the blue, her chic sister, Iris, offers her a Faustian bargain: Write a novel set in her beloved 12th century, but allow Iris to claim authorship. Joséphine will get the money, but Iris will get the fame—the spotlight has always been Iris’ preferred residence. Once a promising film student, Iris staggered everyone 10 years ago by marrying Phillipe, a staid French attorney, settling into a posh lifestyle and abandoning her ambition. So Joséphine sets to work. She's complemented by a richly drawn cast of supporting characters, including the darkly handsome Luca, whom she befriends at the library, and her haughty teenage daughter, Hortense, who alternates between disdainfully humiliating her mother and shamelessly wooing her wealthy Aunt Iris. Meanwhile, Marcel, Iris and Joséphine’s stepfather, cavorts with his beloved secretary. And below the equator, Antoine manages a crocodile farm in Kenya, where he spends his evenings gazing into their hypnotic yellow eyes, looking for the answer to his problems. An international best-seller, this is the first of Pancol’s novels to be translated into English and the first in a trilogy following Joséphine’s family.
Aside from introducing a few contrived plot twists, Pancol deftly manages the constellation of characters in a cleareyed, warmly funny tale.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-14-312155-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
PROFILES
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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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
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