Review by Booklist Review
Life is often grim for the Martins, a working-class Irish family who are the stuff of O'Callaghan's splendid novel. The story begins in 1920 with the death of Jer Martin's beloved older sister, Mamie; continues through the death of the siblings' mother, Nancy, in 1924; and concludes with the imminent death in 1982 of Nellie (Martin) Murphy, Jer's youngest daughter. O'Callaghan divides his novel into three parts, each liming the lives of his three principals. He begins with Jer, an erstwhile soldier who serves in WWI, the horrors of which are viscerally realized. Jer and Mamie were children of grinding poverty, their unwed mother receiving little support from their father, Michael Egan. Part 2 offers the perspective of the mother, Nancy, as she recounts her affair with the charismatic Michael and her subsequent years living a ghastly life in a workhouse. As for Part 3's Nellie, she loses her first baby and her husband dies an untimely death. As awful as these events seem, they're quotidian details for the Martins, and because their experiences are so often grim, it is as if the family members have been sentenced to their lives. O'Callaghan has nevertheless done a brilliant job of capturing the ethos of the Irish setting as we see it through the beautifully created lives of his characters, who are extraordinary, as is this timeless book about them.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
O'Callaghan's tender latest (after the collection The Boat Man) explores three generations of an Irish family forced to deal with hardship and loss. In 1920, Jer Martin, a WWI veteran, still suffers the trauma of trench warfare. After the death of his sister, Mamie, Jer goes on a bender and ends up sleeping it off in jail, where he nurses a grudge against Mamie's worthless husband, Ned Spillane. A section set in 1911 has Jer's mother, Nancy, who was born at the end of the potato famine, remembering an episode when she found work at age 19 in one of the big houses of Cork City. There, she was seduced by the estate's handsome married gardener, Michael Egan, and went on to have two children by him. And in 1982, Jer's dying, 64-year-old daughter, Nellie, living in a council house with her daughter and son-in-law, recalls the time Jer was forced to illegally bury her dead infant son in a cemetery, only to be caught in the act by the local priest. Inspired by stories from his own family history, O'Callaghan delivers a slim novel that is thick with memory and regret. The hard lives of the Martins leave readers with an indelible impression of Irish history. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Irish writer O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations. O'Callaghan's previous novel, My Coney Island Baby (2019), looked at two married lovers facing a painful shift in their years of monthly trysts. Here his sharp pen digs through about 100 years of an Irish family's life, using the voices of three members in as many major sections. In 1920, Jer is drinking heavily to feed the darkness brewing from his sister's death and the blame he heaps on her husband. The police, fearing violence, keep him away from the funeral by putting him in jail. There, his thoughts turn to the Great War, the father he knew only in scattered visits, the destitution of his early life with his sister and mother. The Nancy section, from 1911, renders those early years from his mother's point of view, centering on her affair as a young housemaid with a gardener and their two children, whom the father largely abandoned, condemning her to a grim term in the workhouse and prostitution. Last comes Jer's daughter Nellie, whose life is winding down in 1982 and who recalls the death of her firstborn after just a few hours. In a memorable scene, she and her husband and father embark on a midnight prowl to the Catholic cemetery to bury the unbaptized infant against church rules. There, they meet and defy a priest in a concrete rejection of the church that echoes instances of shaky or absent faith elsewhere in the book. There's much darkness in O'Callaghan's "sentences." Even the title's pun carries a shadow. Yet he writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history--not least because he is tapping his own past, as the acknowledgements note. A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
