"A thrilling tour of an historically volatile conflict..."

I've been in the foulest mood for the last few days. Did no writing. Hated even the thought of doing anything creative. Furious about all kinds of shit. Which I had to keep tamped down while working in the office.

But then Friday I got notification from Kirkus Reviews that they were done with A Place of Safety-Derry. I was actually afraid to read it. Thought they'd see through my lack of background in Northern Ireland. Annihilate my syntax. Mock me for thinking I was a writer. I had to make myself sit down and pull it up...and this is what they said:

A young Catholic boy in Northern Ireland is drawn into the political tumult of the 1970s in Sullivan’s novel.

In 1956, Brendan Kinsella is born in Derry, Northern Ireland, a Catholic town imperiously controlled by a Protestant-dominated government. Just after his 10th birthday, his father, Eamonn, is savagely murdered by two Protestants, an event that transforms the volatile alcoholic into a political martyr. Brendan is unabashedly happy he’s dead—Eamonn’s drunken irresponsibility kept his family in squalid poverty. 

Brendan’s mother, Bernadette, thinks her son dimwitted, but he’s actually just a peculiar loner, disinterested in making friends or playing sports, with an uncanny knack for fixing things. As a young boy, he’s largely indifferent to the political acrimony between Catholics and Protestants—he knows he’s cheated by both, and that his priest, Father Demian, is a hypocrite and likely a pedophile.

However, as violence mounts in Derry and his mother, a nationalist zealot, encourages him to hate the other side, he becomes deeply embroiled in the bitter disputes of the time, a transformation deftly portrayed by the author. Brendan meets Joanna Martin, a Protestant from an affluent family, and quickly falls in love; his devotion to her undermines his blind partisanship, which is gradually replaced by a contempt for both sides. 

“What struck me most was the lunacy of those in control, on either side, who thought they could end this cycle of death by threatening even greater death, but that’s what they did.” 

The arc of Brendan’s maturity is depicted with great subtlety and restraint by Sullivan, who artfully and admirably avoids any sententious proselytizing or earnest sentimentality. In addition to the power of the novel’s emotional drama, the author also provides a historically rigorous look into what came to be known, with astonishing understatement, as “the Troubles.”

This is an engrossing and intelligent work.

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I was so shocked, I actually loved myself for a whole five minutes before thinking, "Shit, I'll never be able to keep this going in New World For Old." But at least I'm back to thinking I can finish this book.