Review by Booklist Review
Late in the night, Irish brothers Gabe and Sketch show up at their solitary cousin Dev's house in the middle of nowhere. With them is a teenage boy named Doll, whom they have taken hostage until the boy's older brother, a former drug dealer, pays the brothers money owed to their gangster boss, Mulrooney. Then the novel moves back to earlier that night, when Doll and his girlfriend, Nicky, attend a party, get drunk, and fight, and Doll disappears. The action then moves back and forth among Dev, Nicky, and Doll as the story and its memorable characters develop. Dev quickly takes center stage as his moving backstory is revealed in a beautiful rendition. The question that then drives the narrative and keeps the pages turning is what will happen to the captive Doll. Award-winning Canadian Irish author Barrett's (Homesickness, 2022) first novel is memorable, character driven, and distinguished by the author's beautiful style. A dog has "demonic yellow teeth"; rain flurries are "like sparks in the night"; someone speaks in "the lively, frictionless register of a priest or minor politician working the room at a parish fundraiser." This carefully plotted novel, with its superbly realized Irish setting, is a generous gift to readers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barrett's splendid debut novel (after the collection Homesickness) wraps a taut crime story around a fascinating set of character studies. In County Mayo, Ireland, 20-something Dev Hendrick has an agreement with Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, weed-dealing brothers who stash their product at his late mother's house. His loyalty is tested after the Ferdias show up with a teen named Donal "Doll" English, whom they've kidnapped and expect Dev to shelter until they receive an overdue payment from Doll's older brother. Barrett replays the night of Doll's capture and following three days of captivity in alternating perspectives, primarily Dev's and that of Nicky Hennigan, Doll's girlfriend who was with him at the party from which he disappeared after they had a drunken fight. Nicky, a 17-year-old bartender with plans to go to college, assumes Doll abandoned her, and vacillates from concern to anger as she wonders if there's room in her future for him. As Doll pleads with Dev to let him go, and after Nicky learns of Doll's predicament, Barrett maps the contours of their inner worlds in dizzying and richly textured detail. Even as Barrett ramps up the suspense, the reader has little doubt as to who these characters really are. This is a knockout. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Dev Hendrick is an introspective thirtysomething living alone in a cottage in the Irish countryside near a small town. His mother, whom he had been living with, has recently passed away; he has quit his job and is subsisting mostly on the income he earns by storing drugs for his cousins Gabe and Sketch Ferdia. Dev's quiet life is suddenly upended when Gabe and Sketch unexpectedly descend on his cottage just before the town's big annual festival, bringing with them a hostage--a local teenager named Doll, whom they've kidnapped to assure payment of drug money owed to them by Doll's older brother. The weekend that follows centers on the not always cordial relationships between the extended family members and on Dev's growing relationship with Doll, all while he explores the narrow contours of his past and present. Hanging over everything is the question of what will happen to Doll come Monday if her brother doesn't repay the Ferdias. VERDICT A remarkably resonant portrait of everyday lives in Ireland. Barrett's gritty and raucous first novel features the hallmarks of his acclaimed short story collections Homesickness (a New York Times Best Book) and Young Skins: linguistic dexterity in the service of fully realized characters and vivid depictions of hard-scrabble small-town Irish life.--Lawrence Rungren
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this adroit debut novel, several already unbalanced characters from a small town in the west of Ireland find their lives thrown into disarray by an ill-conceived kidnapping. Anxious and depressed 20-something Dev Hendrick, whose beloved mother has recently died and whose father is semi-confined to a local mental institution, is living on the dole and occasionally babysitting a shipment of drugs or two when he's approached by his cousins, two local drug-dealing brothers who have decided to incentivize a former comrade, Cillian English, to pay what he owes them by kidnapping, holding for ransom, and threatening to kill his feckless teenage brother, Doll. After the brothers stash the bewildered kidnappee in Dev's basement, the only thing Doll has going for him is the existence of an intelligent and resourceful girlfriend, Nicky Hennigan, who, though she's rapidly losing interest in him, doesn't want to see him dead. Maintaining a tone of dark humor, Barrett deftly ramps up the suspense in a situation where life and death depend on the moment-by-moment choices of characters who have "the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand it." While focusing on one fraught weekend, Barrett takes the time to let the reader get to know the characters involved in this mess in all their complicated and sometimes heartbreaking glory. In particular, Nicky, orphaned young and essentially raising herself, stands out as someone both of the town and on the brink of separating herself from it. Without losing the plot, Barrett peppers each page with wry observations on primary and peripheral characters, including Dev's dead mom's "increasingly unintrepid" little dog, the kidnapper who has "a face on him like a vandalised church," or Doll puffing on a nearly defunct joint "like he was giving it CPR." A pointed and poignant commentary on life on the edges in rural Ireland. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
