Review by Booklist Review
Don't expect spectacle from these eight superb short stories, set, with one exception, in Ireland, for they're quiet examinations of mundane lives that are made extraordinary by the author's remarkable talent for creating unforgettable characters. There is, for example, the quietly resolute female police officer who is summoned to the scene of a shooting where the victim is a would-be poet driven almost mad with jealousy by the success of a much younger poet. There is also a woman smitten by an emotionally troubled young man who is unable to return her feelings. We also encounter the three Hughes brothers, "shortish men with massive arses and brutally capable forearms," as well as a woman whose arm has gone to sleep ("she liked the sensation, as if her arm were holding its breath"). Barrett's stories are, without exception, beautifully written, full of arresting imagery: "the litter of dark needles that had dropped from the tree like a line of gunpowder"; "the cold that had come in with them spreading like a clear thought in the warm room." The stories have another thing in common: abrupt endings that seem to come within a hair of resolution before leaving it to the imaginations of readers to supply their own. Like everything else in these stories, it's an artful strategy, which, taken in sum, demonstrates how beautiful the ordinary can be.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barrett (Young Skins) returns with a set of bittersweet and chiseled tales of Irish life. Each story coolly dissects various disappointments, tragedies, and eccentrics, avoiding epiphanies in favor of quiet, suggestive endings. In the opener, "A Shooting in Rathreedane," even-keeled police sergeant Jackie Noonan responds to the shooting of a petty criminal. While attempting to save his life, Noonan treats him with tenderness, but later can't help feeling ambivalent about his survival. In the slightly surreal and funny "The Alps," a highlight, three brothers encounter a sword-wielding man at their local watering hole. The sharp-edged "Anhedonia, Here I Come" features an unaccomplished poet who, despite making good money drawing pornographic commissions--"the purest perverts longed for their own species of the poetic, for the incarnation of the inconsummatable"--clings to his versifying dreams. And in "The 10," football prodigy Danny Faulkner returns to his hometown and his high school sweetheart after a stint in Manchester United's youth academy. Back home, Danny fends off the recruiting efforts of the local men's team, while his weekend plans consist of watching workers affix new blades to the wind farm's turbines--a far cry from the Premier League. From gritty realism to oddball noir, this assured collection demonstrates the talent of a distinctive writer. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Irish author Barrett, who debuted with the multi-awarding-winning collection Young Skins, returns nearly a decade later with a collection whose characters are somewhat older and more often anguished than angry. In "Whoever Is There, Come On Through," Eileen struggles to help longtime friend Murt, just released after his fourth hospitalization for depression, even as Murt's obnoxious older brother lambastes her and Murt's kindly uncle gives in with a suicide attempt. "Anhedonia, Here I Come" features wannabe poet Bobby, who's surrounded by aging tenants in his crumbling apartment building and supporting himself as a house artist for an online-community website. In the story's last, well-nailed lines, his fate hangs in the balance. "DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?" prompts a video game at the end of a story about two barely adult siblings raising a troubled younger brother, and as Barrett's signature matter-of-fact, pragmatically observed narratives all reveal, that is the question. VERDICT Barrett's mostly dogged characters live hardscrabble lives, and in this strong second collection--not a repeat act--readers become involved in the simple but crucial issue of how they will manage.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Eight richly descriptive stories examine the various textures of disappointment in families and communities where success is not the norm. The stories in Barrett's second collection, set in present-day Ireland and Canada, reveal a different sort of malaise than the title might suggest: Their characters are not so much longing for home as sickened by a place of psychological damage and, frequently, senseless violence. In the opening story, "A Shooting in Rathreedane," that violence, as well as Barrett's pitch-dark sense of humor, is on full display, as police officers in County Mayo head out to a farm to investigate the shooting of a young miscreant, "one of those prolific, inveterately small-time crooks who possessed real criminal instincts but no real criminal talent," and who this time around was attempting to siphon oil from an empty fuel tank. Barrett nimbly balances the pathos of the situation with its troubling ridiculousness. "The Alps," set during an increasingly drunken evening at a country football clubhouse, stretches out to include not just the three "shortish" brothers sporting the "bloodshot eyes, pouched necks and capitulating hairlines of middle age" whose nickname gives the story its title, but the whole community of drinkers in the bar and the mysterious sword-wielding stranger who invades their space. The collection's long concluding story, "The 10," watches dispassionately as waves of disappointment ripple outward from a young man, once a potential football star and now selling cars at his father's Nissan dealership, into the lives of his family, friends, and girlfriend. The fine distinctions of social class in his community are as clearly noted as the protagonist's subtle changes of mood. Barrett's playfully extravagant language makes the depressing stories more palatable even as it distances the reader from the plights of the characters. This sharply observant collection resists pigeonholing its recalcitrant characters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
