Review for A Place of Safety-Derry

 Wow...just...wow...

BookLife:

Raw, pulsing with life and danger, and building to a hard-to-shake climax, this epic novel of growing up in a world gone mad centers on Brendan Kinsella, “a lad filled with hopes and dreams and prayers and promises” in Derry in Northern Ireland, in the tumultuous 1960s, when “Catholics were killed for being Catholic and Catholic schools were attacked by Protestant fools, all because the Catholic minority in the state had the nerve to want the same rights as any Protestant.” Those killed include Brendan’s father. The city seethes and divides as he enters adolescence, confused and fascinated by sex, roiled with complex feelings about his abusive “da”’s death, and all-too-familiar with phrases like “papist scum.” Brandon’s life is shaped by hatreds, bombings, checkpoints, and fleeting moments of connection and beauty in the rubble.

The likelihood of violence haunts both Brendan’s youth and Sullivan’s clipped, brisk, hard-edge prose. A civil rights march facing a line of constables “kept flowing, like a flooded river smashing against a jam of logs and refuse”; Brendan, the famous “fix-it lad” of his circle, laments “the vicious politeness I was being handed by people I’d been doing work for since I could first hold a set of grips.” Dialogue, too, is sharp, slicing, and convincing. The novel is long, but Sullivan, a prolific author in a host of genres, wastes few words conjuring the milieu, the prevailing sense of desperation, and the ugly but undeniable thrill of striking back.

Tense marches and confrontations at checkpoints abound, including one beauty in which women harangue soldiers abusing Brendan and co. with the finest Irish profanity. Sullivan is just as committed to capturing Brandon’s development in moments of relief, working at an auto shop and enjoying the occasional escape, with friends or eventually a lover, into what he calls a “new and amazing world of peace and tolerance.” Those reprieves make the finale all the more wrenching.

Takeaway: Wrenching epic of coming-of-age in Derry during the Troubles.

Comparable Titles: David Keenan’s For the Good Times, Anna Burns’s Milkman.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A