Kirkus Review for APoS-Home Not Home

APoS-HNH preview of cover

I'm not displeased or unhappy with this review. Overall, it's very positive and has some quotable statements to use.

In Sullivan’s historical novel, a young Irishman flees the violence of his native land for America but returns years later to see his dying mother on a trip fraught with danger.

Brendan Kinsella grows up in Derry, Ireland, during the tumultuous years of the Troubles and does his best to avoid the acrimonious partisanship despite his mother’s rabid nationalism and his father’s likely ties to the IRA. Nevertheless, he is drawn into the fray, and after he is involved in a bombing gone wrong that nearly kills him, he escapes to Houston, Texas, to begin a new life under the assumed name Brennan McGabbhinn.

When he discovers that his mother is soon to die from cancer, he comes home to see her, traveling under yet another alias borrowed from a friend—Jeremy Landau, a Jewish American conducting academic research. Brendan, who was 16 years old when he left, now returns to a “city of ghosts” eight years later— “eight bloody fucking years of death and destruction” —in a grim homecoming powerfully described by the author in this emotionally piercing novel. Brendan’s siblings don’t even know he’s alive (his bother Eamonn is in prison for his work against the British), and his mother receives him with an icy coldness, still embittered because he never wholeheartedly joined the cause (a reluctance she interprets as “superior and condescendin’”).

Sullivan poignantly depicts Brennan’s immense psychic struggle—he is torn apart by the discovery that his murdered father might not have been who he believed him to be, and that the girl he loved and presumed dead might still be alive. Moreover, he is still a hunted man in Derry, by both the Irish and the British.

The author brings the crackling volatility of the times to vivid life, especially the infamous hunger strikes. Unfortunately, Sullivan’s prose can lose its luster when he turns, somewhat ponderously, philosophical: “We are born. We live an existence of meaning to ourselves, alone. We die. All else is illusion.” Still, this is a moving portrait of a tragic cycle of violence and the lives it consumes.

A historically exacting and dramatically arresting novel.

I do have to admit I'm a bit taken aback, because it's the first time I've ever had some of my writing referred to as ponderous. And he used something Brendan says in the last paragraph to make that comment.

I'm almost...damn, I am...I'm actually finding it charming.