Review by Booklist Review
Set in a changing Ireland, this novel portrays generational and familial conflict. The Casey and Lynch families share a confrontational history. Tom Casey struggles day in and day out to maintain his farm. The Lynches have moved into real estate. Mark Casey tired of farming and has been pursuing a doctorate in Dublin for years, which strains his relationship with his father. A chance meeting between Mark and Joanne Lynch finds the two families more connected than ever before. With a child on the way, Mark and Joanne forge their shared life in Dublin while addressing the wishes of their rural families. Each character is anxiety-ridden yet able to do little about it. McKeon succeeds in a task difficult to achieve, writing a subtle and quiet novel that is a page-turner. There is activity throughout, but the focus beautifully remains on how each character slowly comes to grips with what is placed in front of him. Mark and Tom Casey are brought back together through tragedy and discover that family remains family.--Parsons, Blai. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McKeon's debut, a study of a modern Ireland at odds with its past, tracks the tragic trajectory of Mark Casey, a doctoral student in Dublin, and his father, Tom, a farmer, both men forged from the same stubborn Irish midland stock and unable to see eye to eye. While Mark struggles to complete his dissertation on 19th-century novelist Maria Edgeworth, whose family estate happens to be just down the road from the Casey farm, Tom demands Mark's presence back in the fields, harvesting and baling hay. Tom's mother, Maura, brokers an uneasy compromise, pulling Mark back home in time to save him grief and the farm failure, then releasing him again to the city. This fragile family balance is disrupted when Mark gets involved with Joanne Lynch, a striking lawyer in training, and the daughter of Tom's hometown sworn enemy, now dead, but no less despised. Joanne's unplanned pregnancy stuns everyone, but the arrival of little Aoife reorders their worlds and renders the old demands petty. When a tragic accident upsets this happy peace, father and son are forced to confront their differences and find a way to co-exist. McKeon's characters transcend archetype and sidestep melodrama as the author delivers a moving story that reflects her Irish nationality and etches the confounding struggle of a country in transition, where the past mythologizes as the present seduces. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Tom Casey farms a small parcel of land near Edgeworthstown in rural Ireland. His son, Mark, lives in Dublin, where he struggles to finish a dissertation about the fiction of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish novelist -Maria Edgeworth. Though bound by blood and common experience, both men live in separate worlds. The distance between them contracts when a devastating tragedy throws them together. Through the Caseys' complicated relationship, McKeon addresses sobering themes: parenthood, identity, vocation, and the limitations of love. By the book's conclusion, father and son seem to have brokered an uneasy but livable peace rooted in the hopes they share for Mark's young daughter. VERDICT McKeon's debut novel heralds a powerful new voice in contemporary Irish fiction, displaying a deliberateness and quiet strength that provides a notable contrast to the frenetic depiction of everyday lives evident in much modern fiction. McKeon's command of description and pacing are especially impressive. Colm Toibin's stylistic influence is evident throughout, though McKeon's treatment of romance and relationships calls to mind Anne Enright's best work.-J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ., Pullman (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A debut novel of love and loss set in contemporary Ireland, where a family's troubled past cast its shadow over an uncertain future. Looking for a distraction from writing his stalled thesis, Mark Casey falls for a green-eyed girl he meets at a Dublin pub. Joanne Lynch, however, is more than a pretty solicitor traineeshe comes from the same patch of rural farmland where Mark grew up. The son of a demanding and truculent farmer, Mark resents the time he must take away from his studies at Trinity College to help out at the family farm in County Longford. That his thesis is going nowhere only adds more strain to his relationship with his father. Joanne is caught in a similar bind. Her late father was a notorious scoundrel whose dodgy dealings earned the enmity of the Casey family, but Joanne is ignorant of the feud. As the new couple navigates their complicated pasts, Joanne becomes pregnant, igniting the fuse to the powder keg into which the young lovers have unwittingly blundered. Midway through the novel, an act of horrendous violence brings the families together in unexpected ways. Though it's not quite Romeo and Juliet, McKeon makes masterful use of the conflict between the two families to propel the story forward and gird scenes of ordinary family drama with tension and dread. Digressions into Joanne's legal work and the subject of Mark's thesis (the novels of English author Maria Edgeworth) prove to be welcome asides that add depth to the characters. For instance, Joanne's infatuation with her client's eccentric mother, a woman she only knows through court transcripts, suggests Joanne might be better-suited to the scholarly work that Mark seems incapable of finishing. At times, Mark's struggle with his father takes on undertones of William Faulkner and Joanne is as nuanced and knowable as the heroine of an Edna O'Brien novel.An engrossing, highly rewarding read that marks McKeon as a writer to watch.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
