Review of Books

Recently published books of Irish and Irish-American interest

Dee’s novel is neither an indictment nor a glorification, but a painstaking, bitingly clever and intimate depiction of a family for whom no goal is unattainable, no achievement great enough. Cynthia and Adam marry at twenty-two, eager to free themselves from the small lives their parents inhabit and create a world together where anything is possible. Adam’s business drive and charm catapult him effortlessly into his boss’s favor, but also keep him unsatisfied with climbing the corporate ladder even at an accelerated pace. He moves to insider trading, amassing wealth that becomes essentially meaningless to Cynthia as she struggles to find purpose, realizing employment will be unnecessary for the rest of her life. Their children April and Jonas, who grow to adulthood over the course of the book, try to carve out identities separate from their parents’ legacy and flirt dangerously with their own mortality in the process.

Dee is a gifted author of four previous novels and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. In a novel that smartly takes on complex issues of risk, reward, and happiness, his talent is irrefutable.

– Kara Rota

 ($25.00 / 272 pages / Random House)

Lisa Moore is a Canadian author of two short story collections, Degrees of Nakedness (1995) and Open (2002), which was nominated for the Giller Prize, and a previous novel, Alligator (2005) which won the 2006 Commonweath Writers’ Prize Best Book Award. Moore’s second novel, February, is set against the backdrop of a historical event in 1982, when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sunk in the Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland. Eighty-four men aboard died.

Heroine Helen O’Mara, widowed in the shipwreck, is left alone to raise four small children and piece together a life absent of her beloved young husband Cal. In a nonlinear, cyclical chronology, Helen’s interior narrative sometimes painstakingly recreates the events surrounding the catastrophe that left her widowed, sometimes recalls from the perspective of age the recklessness of her and Cal’s ephemeral time together, and sometimes focuses on the present as Moore explores what it means to be a woman alone and aging, the simultaneous desire and evasion Helen feels about forging another romantic connection later in life.

 Helen’s children, especially the eldest and the only boy, John, are each impacted differently by their father’s early death as we watch the effects unfurl into their adult lives. Moore is versed in the mundane, the infinitesimal details of a recognizably human, ordinary existence, which are uplifted by her startlingly visceral prose to be transcendent.

– Kara Rota

($14.95 / 320 pages/ Black Cat, an original paperback imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.)

 

An Irish Country Girl is the fourth in the series by Patrick Taylor, and if the popularity of its predecessors is any indication, it is certainly not the last. For those who have not read An Irish Country Doctor or An Irish Country Village, do not despair: Taylor briefly explains the story of his main characters Doctors Laverty and O’Reilly and the picturesque village of Ballybucklebo in which they reside. An Irish Country Girl leaves Ballybucklebo for Cork to tell the story of Kinky Kincaid, the doctors’ housekeeper and beloved neighborhood fixture. Written as Kinky herself recalling her youth to a circle of eager children, the real treat of the novel is not so much its efficient prose but the focus on storytelling and myth as a part of Irish culture. The children of course are an ideal audience; their innocence allows Kinky to explain her life story and its more fantastic elements (as a child, Kinky discovers she can see bean sidhe or faeries, much to the delight of the imaginative children) plainly and honestly. For returning fans of Taylor, An Irish Country Girl is a lovingly told story of how Kinky Kincaid became the spitfire matriarch of the Ballybucklebo series. Taylor’s style, however, much like his characters, is very inclusive: his mixture of traditional recipes, Irish language and Celtic mythology invites everyone to sit around the fire at Kinky’s feet.             

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