Review by Booklist Review
Doyle (Life without Children, 2022) reaches back to earlier novels (The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer) to continue the story of Paula in a tale set during the COVID-19 pandemic. Paula has been widowed for 30 years, but she still has flashbacks to her violently abusive marriage, so evocatively and disturbingly captured in the previous books. However, now sober for many years, she has an enjoyable job, spends time with similarly minded friends, and her four children are doing well. Then one day her oldest and most successful child, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep, having abandoned her own family, and Paula and Nicola reluctantly revisit the traumas they have experienced together and the effects. While Doyle creates a sparse, play-like structure focused on one family, he explores larger themes related to the pandemic, the Irish housing crisis, and the rise of the gig economy. Doyle's hugely influential style--colloquial Irish dialogue, realistic settings, and a focus on working-class life--continues to produce deeply evocative and rewarding fiction, and Paula continues to be a compelling, flawed, and brilliant creation.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Booker Prize winner Doyle's third Paula Spencer novel (after 1996's The Woman Who Walked into Doors and 2006's Paula Spencer) is an emotionally raw mother-daughter drama. Paula, a widow in her mid-60s, who's in recovery for alcoholism, returns home from her Covid-19 vaccine appointment in May 2021 to find her 40-something daughter Nicola waiting for her. Nicola, who cared for Paula during earlier family crises and has continued to supplement her mom's finances, seems content to be mothered for a change. For reasons that don't come out until later, she's left her husband and children behind. Over the next 18 months, as Paula deals with a nasty bout of the virus and worries about money, Doyle eventually works up to revealing why Nicola came to stay with her. If that disclosure is somewhat anticlimactic, it's ultimately less important than Paula's reaction to Nicola's news, which comes to shape her understanding not only of their fraught relationship but also of how her own past traumas impacted Nicola. Despite these revelatory conversations, Nicola remains something of a cipher; Paula, on the other hand, is a richly complex character who continues to redefine herself while also contending with her regrets and past failures. Doyle's compassionate chronicle of recovery and reconciliation is worth seeking out. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Paula Spencer returns, with the demons of her past lurking everywhere around her. Charlo, the abusive husband who drove her to alcoholism inThe Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), has been dead for years, and the shaky sobriety chronicled inPaula Spencer (2007) is long-standing, but the damage inflicted by the beatings and the binges is still with Paula at age 66. The fallout is most evident in Paula's eldest, Nicola, who spent her childhood dealing with a drunken mother and chaotic household. Having worked her way into middle-class respectability, with a gentle husband and three girls, she still acts as though she must take care of Paula, and she still furiously resents it. Simmering tensions between the two, well laid out in the novel's leisurely opening chapters, are exacerbated by the Covid-19 lockdown and come to a head when Nicola storms into Paula's house declaring, "I'll kill them." A glimpse of her brother-in-law ogling her 15-year-old daughter has brought back memories of the look at Nicola that prompted Paula to violently drive Charlo from their home--but not, Nicola bitterly tells her now, before several incidents of inappropriate comments and touching. Years of rage come pouring out of Nicola, and Doyle unsparingly reveals Paula's angry thoughts in response: Did her daughter not know how many times she stood between Charlo and her kids, how many broken bones sent her to drink as a pain reliever? Doyle is no fancy stylist; he excels in the singing speech of ordinary people that reveal the seething emotions underneath. There's no feel-good resolution here, simply the will to go on and the understanding that the bonds of familial love may buckle but can never be broken. A gripping, blisteringly honest examination of issues too long swept under the rug. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
