Got the review today and it's good. I've completed the dust jacket and spent the day correcting a screwup that I don't understand. Word did something to where if I shifted the docx file to PDF, the page numbering was all haywire and there were blank pages. I had to completely redo the formatting.
Booklife 1 August 2024
Vigorous, fiercely emotional novel of an Irishman’s coming of age in Texas.
Raw, tender, lyric, uncompromising, and bursting with life, the second volume of Sullivan’s A Place of Safety series follows 17 year-old Brendan Kinsella as he faces life in the aftermath of the first book’s quite literally explosive climax. To his surprise, he awakens not in the war-torn Northern Ireland city of Derry and the life of poverty to which he had become accustomed. Instead, smuggled out by the IRA, he’s in a wealthy suburban Houston neighborhood—where Americans “lived in fine homes and drove cars as big as barges on the Foyle”—and in the care of an aunt and uncle he’s not sure he can trust. In the U.S. illegally, uncertain whether he’s guest or prisoner, Brendan must adapt to a new identity, a new nation with its own violent fissures, and the guilt he feels over what happened in Derry— and left people he loved dead.
Sullivan’s story covers just a few years of the 1970s, as Brendan begins to find his place, working at a bar and then as a mechanic, experimenting with sex, discovering love, and facing the harsh starkness of American racial and sexual binaries. Again, the narrative voice is intimately insistent, touched with music, frank about dark feelings and events. Even as Brendan finds much to love in his new home—friendships, family, romance, opportunity—the worst of his past bleeds through his consciousness, creating scenes of raw tension when offhand remarks from, say, his scene-stealing young cousins set him spiraling, fighting his own mind.
The ample dialogue and occasional sex are handled with electric vigor, as both author and narrator alike find transcendence in moments of urgent connection, as when Brendan and a girlfriend, who is Black, discuss the roots of hatred in their homelands, or when Brendan and a friend in Israel’s IDF commiserating over what it costs a person to have to kill. For all its density and heft, the novel often moves briskly, at a fierce emotional pitch.
I'll upload it to Ingram tomorrow.
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