The pleasures of violence, suspense, and local color are here in about equal measure. Not to mention the pungency of...
Dear old dirty Dublin, here through the eyes of a cop who single-handedly—and -mindedly—takes on an entrenched gang of vicious businessmen-hooligans.
Pat Coyne has a pretty and ever-cheerful wife, three kids, and a nice house—but he’s let the Cunningham gang get under his skin to the point where, given his hair-trigger anger, he risks losing everything. The Cunninghams, indeed, are despicable drug dealers, torturers, and murderers, with just enough legal savvy to have gotten away with it for years, all the while keeping up ritzy appearances and even opening up, of late, a nightclub. All hateful enough, but there are other things to feed Pat Coyne’s pent-up rage, readying it to be triggered by the vile Cunninghams. Coyne can’t stand his hypercritical mother-in-law, for example, yet she made the down payment on the house he otherwise wouldn’t have. And his wife, Carmel, has taken up art classes—anathema and affectation to plain-speaking Coyne, who thinks there’s too much art in the world already. Not to mention his deeper source of on-going anger. He may not be highly educated, but he’s a thinker, reads incessantly about nature, and is convinced that ecological doom lurks just around the corner—even though no one will take him seriously. They laugh—just like the Cunningham gang laughs at him, too. It’s enough to send a man over the edge—which is where he goes starting when a hatchet comes through his squad car windshield. Sometime later, and very drunk, he torches Berti Cunningham’s fancy car, a true declaration of war. And after getting suspended from his job (he assaults Carmel’s unbearably effete art instructor), it seems there’s nothing for it but to go after the devils alone.
The pleasures of violence, suspense, and local color are here in about equal measure. Not to mention the pungency of language—“gobshite” abundant—and of course the question of whether Pat Coyne will or won’t survive to enjoy the comforts of domesticity.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-56858-195-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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