Funkyfacecat’s #CBR4 Review #28: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Stephen Dedalus wants to fly free of the shackles of nation and religion; Ireland and Catholicism alternatively reject him and entice him. Stephen wants to find his own destiny, to become an artist, an author, with an independent vision and the creative power to realise it. An omniscient narrator tells his story from very early childhood in Anglo-ruled Ireland to disaffected young man preparing for exile, encompassing first love, weird ideas about the body, introduction to Great Literature, questions of language and identity during a turbulent time in a beleaguered country and the need for self-creation unfettered by absent/alcoholic fathers and martyred mothers and mocking schoolmates and cruel priests and policemen.

Portrait is a classic, a work of genius, and I admire it greatly, but I didn’t find it much fun to read – somehow, despite flashes of wit, evocative characterisation and the interesting setting of the novel.

Perhaps Stephen’s – and Ireland’s – story is so complex that Joyce had to break the form of the novel and re-forge it as Ulysses to tell it properly; perhaps it’s just not to everyone’s taste.

Quorren’s #CBR4 Review #48 The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

Rocky Mountain News compares this book to Guinness – dark and Irish.  I would add another descriptor, which hopefully won’t offend beer snobs or the Irish, and that would be bitter.  Quirke, our anti-hero detective, is crippled emotionally and physically and doesn’t have, what one would call, a sunny disposition.  Unlike Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Quirke’s alcoholism is more A&E’s Intervention than AMC’s Mad Men.  The events of Christine Falls has also taken a toll on Quirke’s health as well.

The Silver Swan takes place about a year after the events in Christine Falls.  Quirke is still a pathologist in 1950′s Ireland.  His family is in ruin and he’s pretty much to blame, which leaves him with even more self-loathing than in the previous book.  Quirke is contacted by a school acquaintance, whose wife, Laura Swan, appears to have committed suicide recently.  The acquaintance asks Quirke to forgo an autopsy to save his wife a shread of dignity.  Quirke takes this as redemption for his actions in Christine Falls; before he spoke out about something and ruined many lives, now he has a chance to just keep his mouth shut.  Unfortunately, his curiosity gets the better of him.

I highly recommend reading Christine Falls before this book.  A lot of Quirke personal drama begins in the first book and is carried over to the second.  It also figures heavily into the plot, so you’ll be quite lost without the background.  I had read Christine Falls a few years ago and even I was a bit clueless during the first several chapters of this book.

Mswas’ CBR-IV Review #3 – The Boys Of Summer by Ciarán West

I’ve been pretty busy moderating the CBR, so this is only the third review I’ve felt I really must post. My first review was something I enjoyed, my first read of an author of a thrilling ride of a suspense novel. The second one was Ready Player One, a novel that I called “a tremendous debut”.

Well here we are again. Ciarán West’s Boys of Summer, another tremendous debut novel! Check out my review on my blog.

BoatGirl’s #CBR4 Review #22: Born in Shame (Concannon Sister, Bk3) by Nora Roberts

 The last of the trilogy about the Concannon sisters, Born in Shame is youngest sister Shannon’s story.  She was found by sisters Brianna and Maggie right after her mother died and travels to Ireland to find out the truth about her birth.  She starts out quite torn as she had a good childhood and didn’t know until after his death that her loving father wasn’t her biological parent.  She arrives in Ireland full of resentment towards the dead biological father, Tom Concannon, and the two unknown half-sisters.

 What I enjoyed about this book is the development of the family relationship.  Maggie and Shannon are quite similar and start off with quite a bit of competition and snappishness, but slowly develop respect and liking.  Maggie and Brianna’s mother, Maeve, is a bitchy complainer at the best of times, and on finding out her deceased husband was unfaithful to boot she goes all out.  Yet, eventually even she and Shannon manage to find common ground and learn to live as extended family.

 The love story was the weakest part of the book.  This is where the neighbor of the last two books, Murphy, finally meets a lady.  However, the love story felt rushed and perfunctory.  It is tied in as some sort of mystical preordained crap, where the two were lovers in a previous life who were separated and died hundreds of years before, but that part of the story is never really clear. 

 Overall, it was a predictable book but had some fun parts to it.  Nora Roberts really excels at writing about Ireland, scenery and family relationships.

BoatGirl’s #CBR4 Review #19: Born in Fire by Nora Roberts

I think Nora Roberts falls somewhere between trashy novel and chick lit.  I feel vaguely guilty reading her books, but not like my brain power is withering away.  She may write about beautiful, misunderstood women finding the one handsome, caring man who can understand them, but she does so with well-crafted sentences, decent dialogue and an ear for dialect.  She clearly adores Ireland and the Irish, bringing out the fine points of the country and culture.

Like many Nora Roberts’s books, Born in Fire is set in Ireland.  Book one of a trilogy, it tells the story of the eldest sister of an unhappy marriage.  Maggie Mae Colcannon has taken the pain of her mother’s hostility and turned it into beautiful art, working in blown glass.  After her loving father dies, she is determined to save her younger sister, Brianna, from a lifetime at their mother’s beck and call, so she enters an exclusive deal to sell her art to an international art dealer, Rogan  Sweeney.

As you may guess by the name, Rogan is the love interest.  Handsome, unattached, and too focused on business, he needs Maggie to bring passion and fire to his life.  As he is wealthy, this occurs not only in Western Ireland, but also in Paris and Manhattan.  This was a fun book to live vicariously through.

faintingiolet’s #CBR4 review #10: Nora Roberts’ Jewels of the Sun

So apparently I wasn’t done with my romance kick after just the one book. I knew it couldn’t be that simple. So here we go, once more into the breach…

This book analyses what would happen if you woke up at 29, divorced, disillusioned, disappointed in your professional ability and perhaps independently wealthy.  Oh, and your grandmother’s cousin has died and left her cottage in Ardmore, Ireland without a tenant.

If only this were my life…

But I digress. We meet Jude at the top of the story, as she is working her way through driving on the wrong side from Dublin to Ardmore, down on the coast. She’s in just the sort of predicament I’ve outlined above. Her husband asked for a divorce after 7 months, having fallen for another woman, she’s not a very good professor at the college in Chicago so she quit. Her grandmother sent her off to a family home which is currently without a tenant, and she is here to stave off a nervous breakdown. She would know; she has a degree in psychology.

Jude’s the kind of character you vote for.  You want her to discover who she is outside of everyone else’s opinions and expectations. And there seem to have been a lot. This is a romance, so there must be a romantic lead and his name is Aidan, the local publican. She’s planning on being gone in 6 months time, as that’s all she’s allowed herself for this respite and he’s not looking for anything serious.

But that’s not what the fairy king has in mind.

Did I not mention the fairies? Oh, they’re involved in this one. Roberts has left her grounded in (rosy) realism storytelling and headed over into the land of the supernatural. And I kind of love it. This book is actually the first in a series of three, something very common in Roberts’ world, and there is a story of love lost between the fairy king and the original owner of the cottage, who still haunts the place waiting for the love which was lost. Now it’s up to Jude and Aidan, and eventually Aidan’s siblings and their respective romantic interests, to express a true love outside of the empty promises the fairy king once offered a fair maid.

This review and other ramblings about museums and education can be found here.