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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Silver Falls Library | FIC O'CONNOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic O'Connor, J. 2007 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the author of the international bestseller Star of the Sea comes this epic novel and unforgettable love story. This book took my breath away . . . it] is a brave book and only a brave heart could have written it.--Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela's Ashes.
Author Notes
Joseph O'Connor's debut novel "Cowboys & Indians" was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize. His other works include the novels "Desperados", "The Salesman" & "Irishowen", the story collection "True Believers", the stage play "Red Roses & Petrol", & an anthology comic journalism, "The Secret World of the Irish Male". His work has been widely translated & won many prizes, including the Macaulay Fellowship of the Irish Arts Council, the Miramax Ireland Screenwriting Prize, & the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award. He lives in Ireland.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Irish author O'Connor (Star of the Sea) delivers a highly stylized post-Civil War period pastiche centered on Redemption Falls, a tumultuous frontier town in the Mountain Territory (presumably in present day Utah or Montana). Told through the posters, correspondence, poems/songs, newspaper articles and interview transcripts collected in the early 20th century by a university professor (and nephew of one of the book's prominent characters), the narrative follows acting governor James Con O'Keeffe as he feuds with his ravishing wife, Lucia-Cruz McLelland, about the mute 12-year-old drummer boy Con takes in and wants to adopt. The boy, Jeddo Mooney, is in a bad way and unaware that his tenacious older sister, Eliza Duane Mooney, is hiking from war-ravaged Louisiana to find him. (Her journey is its own mini-epic.) Con's past as an English criminal who barely escaped the noose and his behavior as an American politician demonstrate his noble but flawed character, while a chorus of minor voices add texture to a narrative already rich with a medley of languages, dialects and clashing cultural mores. The novel is complex, ambitious and at times difficult (many characters are uneducated, and their journals and letters prove to be occasionally impenetrable). O'Connor succeeds as a ventriloquist who brings to life a wide cross-section of Americana. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Immigrants, vagabonds and rebels cross paths in the bloody wake of the American Civil War. Irish novelist O'Connor crafts an emotional sequel, of sorts, to his much-lauded previous immigrant fable (Star of the Sea, 2003). In picking up the loose threads from Star of the Sea, some 18 years after the ship arrived in America, the author constructs this fascinating, mercurial historical epic. It begins with a girl, Eliza Mooney, the daughter of nanny Mary Duane from the previous book, who walks, barefoot, clothes in tatters, across the emotionally bankrupt South in search of her wayward brother Jeremiah, known to her as Jeddo. Her journey points her toward Redemption Falls, a cruel and nearly lawless settlement in the heart of the Western frontier. Her passage will cost her dearly, but it brings her into the orbit of dozens of other outlandish primary characters including errant cartographer Allen Winterton, an expressive black slave called Elizabeth Longstreet and a rough-and-tumble Irish outlaw named Johnny Thunders. Though all are gripping in their own way, they ultimately fall under the purview and shadow of James Con O'Keeffe, a flamboyant Irish republican, anarchist and skillful raconteur who has sweet-talked and schemed his way into the governorship of his rural kingdom. O'Connor pieces together the scraps of their lives, employing oral histories, translated letters, poems, daguerreotypes and even wanted posters. The transitions between passages can be jarring, but the richness of the overall effect is undeniable. A striking Western epic elevated by a Greek chorus of deviant narrators. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this vibrant literary collage, O'Connor illuminates a slice of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The stories of Eliza Mooney and her younger brother, Jeremiah, are intertwined in this enthralling saga with those of General James O'Keefe and his wealthy wife, Lucia, through letters, personal accounts, transcripts, newspaper articles, and miscellany. As the bloody war ends, Eliza worldly wise beyond her teenage years sets out on foot from Baton Rouge to find her only remaining kin, a boy who emerges from battle to become the surrogate son of the general, whose failure on the Union battlefield earns him the job of acting governor of an untamed mountain territory. The stories of O'Keeffe's disreputable past, Lucia's temptation during her husband's absence, Eliza's torturous journey, and the horrors of war witnessed by Jeremiah are vivid and tumultuous, coursing to a bloody climax. Although Irish immigrant participation in the Civil War is a central theme, O'Connor also shows the rich diversity of a country torn by civil conflict.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A governor, vagabonds and parallel plots converge in a space resembling mid-19 th-century Montana. READERS who like their plots clear and coherent and their prose clean and Hemingwayesque will drop this book in a hurry. Readers with a taste for inspired Joycean wordplay and a tolerance for narrative anarchy will scoop it up in delight. Joseph O'Connor, an Irish novelist and playwright, is best known in this country for "Star of the Sea," a remarkable and affecting novel set on a passenger ship traveling from Ireland to America in the winter of 1847, at the height of the great potato famine. In "Redemption Falls," he has kept many of the novelistic techniques he used so well in the earlier book - multiple points of view, letters, fictional documents and pseudo-authorial footnotes. But while "Star of the Sea" gained power from its disciplined compression of setting and the linear clarity of the voyage, this new book sprawls across a vague, unmapped space that resembles mid-19th-century Montana and has no more linear clarity than a swatted beehive. / In 1866, Gen. James Con O'Keeffe, an Irish immigrant and (in many eyes) disgraced Union Army veteran, is acting governor of a region known simply as "the Territory." Its capital, the town of Redemption Falls, has attracted a host of wildly different characters, creating a cross section of voices, chiefly Irish. Among the loudest are those of a poet from New York who also happens to be O'Keeffe's estranged wife; a furiously bitter former Confederate soldier, now an outlaw; and a 17-year-old girl, traveling on foot from Baton Rouge in search of her brother. In fictional if not Euclidean geometry, parallels do meet. Sometimes we follow the girl and the outlaw on the road; at other times and in no particular pattern, we encounter the girl's brother, a freed slave, O'Keeffe's poet wife, her adulterous lover and half a dozen other figures. But though we may loop back in time to the Civil War or as far away as a convict prison in Tasmania, these stories and voices all converge on the enigmatic figure of O'Keeffe, who waits brooding and drunk - and definitely unredeemed - in Redemption Falls. One of the purposes of literature is, as Dr. Johnson said, to bring realities to mind, but no one is likely to mistake these characters for actual people. This is partly because - a considerable mistake in a historical novel - their actions are so detached from historical particulars. But it's mostly because on virtually every page O'Connor's hyperkinetic prose throws up a dancing screen of rhetoric that obscures both plot and character. This style can be memorable: on a hot road Eliza "blisters in sunroar" and "the land unspools like a painted diorama." It can also be very funny: "Cows enstalled, staring like a row of nuns." And Eliza's stream-of-consciousness observations can even be strangely poetic: "Burnt cotton in the air. And rooks. And scorched banknotes. Strange confetti, those gallowsblack angels." But too much rhetorical cleverness leads O'Connor to narrate his violent climax at a distance, through formal transcripts and official reports, at the cost of immediacy and drama, as if we were observing the action through the wrong end of a telescope. And far too often his language collapses from the poetic into the absurd (making love, O'Keeffe and Lucia "clunk like the couplets of a youthful sonnet") or grows unbearably pretentious ("And on lurches the boy, gangly in his drabs, stumbling over cairns of the unseen eyes, which lie around the stubbles like the umlauts in the depths of a type-compositor's drawer"). "Oh rocks!" says Molly Bloom, drumming her fingers in impatience. "Tell us in plain words." / Max Byrd's books include the historical novel "Grant."
Library Journal Review
When a seasoned author like Ireland's O'Connor (Star of the Sea) writes historical fiction, it is rich with more than facts, dates, and famous faces. It becomes a living, breathing narrative, envisioned by an artist. This is what O'Connor's latest offers readers seeking a style that goes beyond conventional storytelling. To explore the experience of Irish immigrants during the U.S. Civil War and the expansion of the American West, O'Connor uses a variety of narrative voices and epistolary forms of storytelling that change the tempo and meaning of his tale. Among his characters is Eliza Duane Mooney, who is trekking across post-Civil War America in a twisted quest. Lucia-Cruz McLelland is a beautiful artisan who discards her suitors in New York City to forge a life in the desolate town of Redemption Falls with war hero and revolutionary James Con O'Keefe. A runaway slave living with O'Keefe also plays a role at this crossroads of the world, holding her past in the flickering light and turning her losses into hope. Beautifully written, this work is recommended for all historical fiction collections.-Ron Samul, New London, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.