THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

NOMINATED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...a longlist of twenty will be announced in February 2026, the shortlist of six in April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.

THE BEE STING, Paul Murray's calling-card book

THE BEE STING
PAUL MURRAY
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book is A Lot. Long, deep, densely packed.

I enjoy reading anything that plays in the quantum fields of many worlds. The idea of one.little.change. making all the difference in one's life is very empowering, as well as nonsense, and honestly hazardous. All of those are reasons we love to mess with it safely in our fiction. Here Paul Murray goes full-tilt boogie down this waterslide, wets us to the bone in the spume of his landing, and completely destroys our hairdos.

Is it good anyway? Well...honestly...yes, but in a curious way no. Want to laugh hollowly at the folly of the merely mortal? Come hither, disciple dearest. Want to process your grief at the titanic (or Titanic) sinking of the life you planned? This is your altar call. Or is the appeal of a stonking novel immersive and redemptive reading? Hie thee hence, pilgrim. Nothing for you here...there is no redemption here, no one's gettin' what they think they deserve before the Apocalypse that's looming calypses. Need rigorous copyediting with Oxford commas, periods, line breaks, and other such embankments to channel the flow of the words? Ite, missa est. No communion cookies for you, though madeleines will be served in the Sodality of Marcel's post-tea.

Digressive is my word for this seemingly Irish specialty of novels (Milkman's another favorite) that don't give a feck for your English rules. Me, I'm down with it, I like things that don't slavishly straiten their gates to some Authority's pre- and proscriptions just cuz. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of the culture wars! Whatever you do, don't be boring!

That said...well, honestly I found the central thesis of the family tedious and predictable: Dad's crushed, Mom's hogtied and struggling, Junior's got his antennae out so far they can find meaning in electric currents imperceptible to an ammeter, Sis is in thrall to the Mother of All Crushes on the most dreary poseur in all of literature...really, does this need retelling? The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, To the Lighthouse, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and every Colleen Hoover book ever written fill these separate niches extremely ably...have for most of a century. (It felt like a century passed when I read 102pp of It Ends With Us. *shudder* I {mildly mis-}quote that nasty little creep Truman Capote: "That's not writing, that's typing.")

So my bag was mixed. I loved parts, liked most of it, and was impatiently awaiting liftoff that never quite generated enough thrust to get me over the literary Kármán line. Hence my stingy-feeling 3.5 stars. It might be stingy but it's waaay better than most stuff I read and toss aside. I'm really umpressed with Author Murray's swinging for the fences in all his writing and storytelling. I mean, mad respect for going toe-to-toe with the twentieth century's greats (and megabestselling hack Hoover)! But coming for the monarch isn't safe lest you fail to slay them.

No slaying here, though some serious wounds were delivered.

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir, or "How to Laugh Your Way Through Grief"

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir
SÉAMAS O'REILLY
Little, Brown
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year old Seamas and his ten (TEN!) siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow Seamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

Along the way, we see Seamas through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time Seamas worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the President of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired Seamas regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a sotan” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.

That's from the LitHub piece about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.