____________________________________________________________________________________________ KIRKUS Reviews An American woman revisits the scene of a traumatic experience she suffered as a teenager in McBride’s novel. In 1973, a 16-year-old Violet O’Halloran travels from her home in New York City to Northern Ireland with her mother, but the trip is clouded by her grandmother’s unexpected death. Violet’s mother unloads the rebellious teen at St. Dymphna’s, a Catholic boarding school, for the duration. Her sole companion is the only other resident, Indira Sharma, a blind girl who speaks in enigmatic riddles. The pair becomes fast friends, inseparable as sisters, bonding over their contentious relationships with their mothers and the absences of their dead fathers; their tender connection is delicately drawn by the author in this emotionally haunting work. Indira dies in a drowning accident—Violet nearly dies herself trying to rescue her. It’s a traumatic event she has trouble clearly recollecting, and from which she cannot fully be free. In New York City, 13 years later, Violet meets Emmett Fitzroy, a handsome photographer from Ireland (in fact, he grew up near St. Dymphna’s). He invites her to become the temporary caretaker of his family’s home there, a position she accepts, plunging back into memories of her summer there and the “catastrophic land” she cannot help but miss. In this subtle and complex tale, the author explores the possibility that both the proximate and remote past can be mined for lucidity and the idea that the dead can help the living discover an otherwise elusive resolution to emotional conflicts, albeit with great difficulty. (“The Irish say it is only a thin curtain that separates the living from the dead, but they are poets and those are beautiful words. It is a harder partition than that, and more mysterious. There are times when it feels impenetrable.”) McBride’s prose is ruminatively poetic and broodingly searching, and powerfully captures Violet’s distress against the symbolically pregnant backdrop of Northern Ireland’s political tumult. This is a deeply thoughtful work, elegiacally written and impressively sensitive. A nuanced exploration of trauma, personal and historical. Editor’s Pick, Publisher’s Weekly Booklife Set amidst “the moody depths of Irish coastal light, the volatility of the wild North Atlantic tides,” this gorgeous, resonant novel of self-discovery and mystery in adolescence and womanhood centers on an unexpected connection and its impact over decades. In 1973, American teen Violet is brought by her mother to war-torn Northern Ireland, and soon, after the death of Violet’s Irish grandmother, the young woman finds herself stuck for the summer in St. Dymphna’s, a convent school empty save for one other young woman: blind Indira, from India, betrothed to a cousin and, like Violet, desperate for connection. The two form a fast bond, sharing their days, their cultures, their loneliness, and—in a series of lyric scenes of exquisite tenderness—their reflection, as Violet describes themselves in a mirror, and Indira explains what she remembers mirrors as being like. “You are my reflection and I am yours,” Indira tells her, but what takes root in summer doesn’t always flourish in the school year. As other students return, the pair begins to lose each other, until tragedy strikes. Over a decade later, chance again brings Violet, now a New York waitress and sometime college student, to that same stretch of Ireland as a caretaker for upper-class Emmett, a man distinguished by Aran sweaters, complicated feelings for his family, and a connection to the friend who still haunts Violet—and who has become a figure of local legend. With wisdom and electric scene-craft, McBride (The Land of Women) deftly contrasts the urgent feelings of youth with the pained uncertainties of an adult facing the past and the losses that come with adulthood. The prose is rich but swift, tuned to the heart and the telling detail, exploring coasts, convents, secrets, and the mysteries of the heart with piercing power, all as Violet faces both the past and the “thin curtain between the world of the living and the world of the dead.” Dazzled readers will likely seek out McBride’s earlier books. Takeaway: Powerhouse novel of Ireland, an intense girls’ friendship, and facing the past. And here is a link to an author Q and A with Deborah Kalb. https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2024/06/q-with-regina-mcbride.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1QlHAz1_rSNrWDpuFeCghVw9ErGnms2Nj3qTJwAOLRInz2UkkbnTo_ZIs_aem_NkaBWEkrQ9GSHgiqwzuWvA