3★ "MARCH 2017: Flynn was studying in her bedroom at nine-forty-eight p.m. on Friday March 1st, when her parents were killed in a car crash."
Just a war3★ "MARCH 2017: Flynn was studying in her bedroom at nine-forty-eight p.m. on Friday March 1st, when her parents were killed in a car crash."
Just a warning, this starts off with a bang. Flynn, 16, and her younger sister Kaiya, 12, are suddenly orphaned, and before they know it, their mother's estranged sister and husband move in, their auntie eyeing the lovely furnishings and their uncle eyeing and touching the two young girls.
Flynn confides in thir school principal, who immediately confirms Flynn's lie to the aunt and uncle that the girls' parents had intended they become boarders, not just day students. These sisters are the first 'story'.
From March 2017, the book jumps back several years and begins a second story, about a boy.
"April 2011 Noah Santoro was rubbish at sport. That wasn’t him trying to be modest or anything. He really was sh*t. In primary school, things had been fine. They’d tried out sports like basketball and football in PE for a term, and almost everyone was equally rubbish and it had been fun. A break from sitting in a classroom, trying to make sense of stuff that the teacher seemed to think should be easy, but which to Noah was so difficult it was almost funny."
Now he's struggling in high school, but the rugby coach, Mike Anders, sees that Noah has some skills and names him for one of the teams. Noah wishes he could get a rugby ball and some boots, but he and his mum, who has no money, live with his abusive stepfather. No chance.
He notices new bruises on his mum and finally confides in the coach when Mike asks him what's bothering him.
" 'Noah, there are places that you and your mum can go while she gets back on her feet. If that’s what she wants. There are organisations that help women who are in your mum’s situation. If you like, I can talk to someone. I have a friend, another teacher, not at this school, who has connections. I could talk to her and see what’s available, and then maybe I could talk to your mum.' "
None of this felt like Dervla McTiernan. Like many readers, I've liked her Cormac Reilly series, but I have to admit I haven't cared for her other books as much. This was originally produced as an Audible Original audio, which I haven't heard. The text reads like a simplified YA story, and I began to skim. As I say, this just doesn't sound like McTiernan.
The last third or so becomes a thriller which includes attempted suicide, murder, and kidnapping. But it didn't rescue the story for me.
Thanks to the author for making it available to readers who subscribe on her website to her newsletter. I always enjoy hearing from her, and she's a delight to listen to in interviews. I suspect the audio version may be better....more
3★ "In the late autumn of that year, 1938, I had a bad fit of the spleen. I was living in Turin at the time, and my tart No. 1, while groping about in 3★ "In the late autumn of that year, 1938, I had a bad fit of the spleen. I was living in Turin at the time, and my tart No. 1, while groping about in my pockets for an odd fifty-lire note as I slept, had also found a letter from tart No. 2, which in spite of spelling mistakes left no doubts about the nature of our relationship."
I have to say this was an intriguing first sentence. I was pleased that at least tart No. 1 took off wearing Paolo's favourite black cashmere sweater.
He decides to spend his evenings in his local café after work, as a good place to kill time, tartless, as it were.
"For this period of retirement I could have found no place more suitable than the café in Via Po where I began spending every free moment alone and always went in the evening after my work on the paper. It was a kind of Hades peopled by bloodless shades of lieutenant-colonels, magistrates, and professors. These insubstantial apparitions would play draughts or dominoes, immersed in a light dimmed, during the day, by arcades and clouds, and at night by huge green shades on the chandeliers; no voices were ever raised lest too loud a sound disturb their tenuous woof. A most suitable Limbo."
He becomes fascinated with an old man sitting nearby who reads the papers and spits in disgust (and disgustingly) at what he reads. The staff tell Paolo the man is Senator Rosario La Ciura. Even Paolo knows this man's name and looks him up at work in the pre-prepared obituary notices for famous people.
As they talk, and Paolo's told him about his tartless state, the man informs him he has never touched a woman. But… then he goes on to recount his past lust/love affair with a mermaid.
The professor is certainly memorable, but this doesn't feel to me as if it adds anything to the usual myths and legends of mermaids and sirens and fishermen. ...more
5★ " A waiting list at the Empire Grill? If this continued he'd have to add that damn "e" to "Grill," just like Walt Comeau kept suggesting."
Hang on – 5★ " A waiting list at the Empire Grill? If this continued he'd have to add that damn "e" to "Grill," just like Walt Comeau kept suggesting."
Hang on – that's not going to happen. Mrs. Whiting is the boss, owns the Empire Grill, owns most of what's worth owning in Empire Falls, including the deserted old textile mill on the river, and pretty much runs the town and everyone in it… and she doesn't want to renovate the old restaurant. And Walt Comeau is full of hot air.
Empire Falls is yet another of the mill and mining towns that have gone the way of the steam engine -great in their day, but outgrown now and times have moved on.
It's no surprise to me that this won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Loved it!
Miles Roby seems to be stuck in early middle age as a manager and short order cook instead of an academic – or almost anything else – because he gave up college to come back home to this dying Maine town to care for his dying mother. She demanded he go back to school, but no.
He and his younger brother, David, with an arm badly damaged in a drunken car crash, are working for Mrs. Whiting. David has stayed sober, and after years of discord, the brothers are getting along.
"Strange. He and David were closer now, since his brother's crippling accident, than ever. Before, both men had pushed their conversations until their words burst into flame, rekindling age-old resentments, reopening old wounds. There was nearly a decade's difference in their ages, and their life experiences were radically dissimilar. Miles had grown up before their mother became ill, David after."
Most of this is told from Miles's point of view, with lengthy sections about the past printed in italics. His mother, Grace, was a beautiful girl and is still a head-turner. She worked at the mill until it closed. Now she's taking Miles on a short vacation on Martha's Vineyard, but not at an upmarket place.
"At thirty, Grace was an attractive woman, and even in the company of a nine-year-old boy, she was regarded by many of the male guests with admiration open enough to be noted by their wives. One man stopped by their blanket and introduced himself, wondering why the two of them never appeared in the dining room in the evening…"
They do make a new friend who takes them under his wing, shows them around, treats them to some nice meals and makes their holiday something special. But Miles misses having his mother to himself. His father, Max Roby, is a disreputable house painter who comes and goes from Empire Falls when the spirit moves him, so Miles has looked up to his mother and the Church for guidance.
"Miles told her he didn't want to go out to dinner with Charlie. He wanted for it to be just the two of them. They'd been having fun, he told her, before Charlie Mayne showed up.
'Yeah?' Grace said, angry so instantly that it scared Miles, as if she'd been just waiting for him to say something like this. 'Well, I've been having fun since he showed up. What do you think about that?'
Miles didn't answer immediately. 'Dad wouldn't like it,' he said, looking right at her.
'Tough.'
'I'll tell.'
'Fine,' she said, surprising him again, increasing the sensation he'd been feeling all day that everything was adrift. She'd taken out the ointment and was applying cream to her skin. 'Then tell.'
'I will,' he said, knowing it was the wrong thing but saying it anyway.
'You'll have to wait till he gets out of jail, though,' she said, her eyes suddenly harder than he'd ever seen them. She hadn't so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages, and she watched him now as if purely curious as to the effect they'd have. If necessary, she had more of them to turn loose. 'You didn't know that, did you? That your father was in jail.' . . . 'You want to know why, Miles? Because last week he was arrested as a public nuisance, that's why. Not for the first time, either. He becomes a public nuisance every now and then when he tires of being a private one. And I'll tell you something else, too. You think Max Roby would care if you told him about Charlie Mayne? Think again. Your father cares only about your father. I wish that weren't so, but it is, and you're old enough to know it. The sooner you understand it, the better off you'll be.'"
For Miles, this puts a whole new perspective on his dad
"At first the news of his father's being arrested had mortified and humiliated him; but the more he thought about it, the more comforted he felt. Until this afternoon he'd always known that his father was a different sort of man from other boys' fathers, but he'd had no way of summing him up. Now he did. Max Roby was a public nuisance. Having this short phrase to describe him was better than suspecting that his father was so different and unnatural that nobody had yet invented a way to describe him."
Max is now "sempty" as he keeps saying and just as much a public nuisance as he was in his sixties and all the decades before. He is reminiscent of a couple of characters from Russo's 1993 novel "Nobody's Fool", which I also loved.
The week Miles spent with his mother on the Vineyard affects all of his life and his thinking. His mother becomes a daily churchgoer, signs him up as an altar boy (which he loves), and tries as hard as possible to get him out of Empire Falls, forever… to escape, as she was never able to.
Now he's cooking burgers, facing divorce from his soon-to-be ex-wife Janine (whom he loves, more or less), and putting up with daily visits from Walt Comeau, aka the Silver Fox, Janine's fiancé, a gym-club owner who likes to pester Miles with fitness tips.
He adores his teen daughter (who's on his 'side', not her mother's), and still secretly, but not so secretly loves working all these years later with his high school crush, Charlene, who hosts and waitresses at the Empire Grill. All the boys lusted after her (big boobs), but Miles genuinely loves her.
She's three years older than Miles, and she still treats him like a little brother. She's been married a couple of times and is reasonably content. When Miles and David do decide to extend their menu to special evenings and attract staff and students from a nearby university, she's pleased.
" … she was confident that despite their carefully trimmed beards, their pressed chinos and tweed jackets, college professors tipped in the same fashion as other men—according to cup size. She was doing very well by them, thanks all the same."
There's a younger generation thread, a crooked cop thread, and Mrs Whiting's shadow over everything. I get completely immersed in Russo's places and feel I'd recognise his people.
As well as reading, I also listened to the audio. Narrator Ron McLarty has just the right touch for this one. I alternate reading and listening, depending on my mood. This is one I'd enjoy in either format - it is terrific.
5★ “Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always. Because any changes might be worse. So terribly much worse.”
Ma5★ “Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always. Because any changes might be worse. So terribly much worse.”
Make no mistake – this is a scary story. Everybody in Peaksville understood the rules and said things were fine and good, even if someone had died. Not only did they have to talk like this, they had to think like this around Anthony.
He’s a strange little boy who hears people’s thoughts – not so much a mind-reader as an unintentional eavesdropper. When he hears about trouble, he feels he needs to fix it, but he’s a kid, so what does he really know.
He’s currently using mind control to make a rat eat itself (blech), but he has his reasons.
“Aunt Amy hated rats, and so he killed a lot of them, because he liked Aunt Amy most of all and sometimes did things that Aunt Amy wanted.”
The operative word there is “sometimes”. When Bill Soames arrives on his bike with the mail, he tries hard to mumble and think mumbled thoughts so he won’t attract Anthony’s attention. He’s anxious to leave, and as he goes out the gate, he makes the mistake of thinking just that.
“As Bill Soames pumped the pedals, he was wishing deep down that he could pump twice as fast, to get away from Anthony all the faster, and away from Aunt Amy, who sometimes just forgot how ‘careful’ you had to be. . . . Pedaling with superhuman speed – or rather, appearing to, because in reality the bicycle was pedaling him – Bill Soames vanished down the road in a cloud of dust, his thin, terrified wail drifting back across the heat.”
Anthony had decided to ‘help’ him.
As a fan of Twilight Zone and of short stories in general, this one felt appropriately ‘out there’. When the townsfolk gather for a birthday celebration, everyone is tense.
“The next arrivals were the Smiths and the Dunns, who lived right next to each other down the road, only a few yards from the nothingness.”
“The nothingness.” Where IS Peaksville?
I mention Twilight Zone because of the reference in the introduction to the story, which I have added to encourage you to read the story (and others) yourself.
“Jerome Bixby (1923 — 1998) was an American short story and script writer who wrote four Star Trek episodes and helped write the story that became the classic sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage (1966). He is most famous for the “It’s a Good Life” (1953), also made into a Twilight Zone episode and included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). The Science Fiction Writers of America named “It’s a Good Life” one of the twenty finest science fiction stories ever written. References to the story have appeared in the Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo, Fox’s The Simpsons, and a Junot Diaz novel, among others.
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