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Book Reviewed by:A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer.
Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely - a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.
Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving re-encounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.
Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right ... Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.
With all her imperfections and foibles, Tess makes for an interesting character, and readers will find themselves easily drawn to her story. I felt like I was checking in on a distant friend each time I picked up the book...continued
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(Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
Mary Costello's Academy Street follows the life of Tess Lohan, an introverted Irish woman who often feels anxious in social settings, largely preferring the world of books and imagination to external interactions. At various times in her life, she finds herself at a loss for words, in situations that "[take] all her talk away." After one particularly frightening experience as a child, Tess loses her ability to speak altogether. She falls silent for months, unable to utter a word.
She joins her hands and says a Hail Mary. She listens for the words, to test her sound. But no sound comes. She prays louder, harder. She gives a little cough, and tries again. She starts to cry.
It's likely that Tess suffers from "selective ...
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Donal Ryan, author of The Spinning Heart
Academy Street is understated, graceful and, ultimately, devastating. Even as my heart was breaking I couldn't put the book down.
