The Bus on Thursday – 4/5 Stars This was an audiobook and I hadn’t heard of it before I looked a little into and downloaded it from Overdrive. Also, had this not been Australian I might not have listened to it, and had I read the back I wouldn’t either. I also almost turned it off early on because of a kind of off-key line that I didn’t like. But something clicked in my experience at some point and I ended up really liking it. […]
Now and at the hour of our death …
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a delight to read. McDermott’s writing is warm and evocative, featuring vivid, relatable characters and spaces in which one longs to linger. Brooklyn and the Catholic Church of the 1920s come alive through her novel. At the same time, McDermott uses these very real people and the situations they face to challenge the reader to think about life, death, suffering and redemption. McDermott presents us with a world that we see almost exclusively from the perspective of women […]
Relatively Charming
Charming Billy is a quiet little novel that takes place over the course of one day at Billy Lynch’s wake. Our narrator is the adult daughter of Billy’s best friend Dennis, and she is telling the story to her husband, who isn’t at the funeral. It’s an unusual narration, and one that took me quite awhile to figure out, but it works within the context of the story. The story begins at a bar after the funeral, where approximately fifty mourners have gathered to eat […]
Someone: A Novel by Alice McDermott
It’s hard to give a plot summary for this novel because I’m not sure there is a clear plot line. The narrator Marie gives us her life story, an ordinary life with love and loss, births and deaths, set in Brooklyn from her 1920s’ girlhood through WWII, then marriage and family. It’s about what happens to her, her neighbors, her parents and brother. These are ordinary lives but no life is really just ordinary. There’s always more to people than you realize. McDermott’s writing is […]