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Overview
Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia twice a week with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. The children quietly observe Aunt Veronica, who drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, a caustic career woman, and finally Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossoming with a late and unexpected love, dutifully absorbing the legacy of their less-than-perfect family. Alice McDermott beautifully evokes three generations of an Irish-American family in this "haunting and masterly work of literary art" (The Wall Street Journal).
This acclaimed national bestseller by the author of A Bigamist's Daughter and That Night tells the all-too-human story of the dramatic--and melodramatic--ebb and flow of the lives of an Irish Catholic family--a bittersweet, triumphant, haunting evocation of life's calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love. "Beautifully wrought."--The New York Times.
Synopsis
Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia twice a week with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. The children quietly observe Aunt Veronica, who drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, a caustic career woman, and finally Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossoming with a late and unexpected love, dutifully absorbing the legacy of their less-than-perfect family. Alice McDermott beautifully evokes three generations of an Irish-American family in this "haunting and masterly work of literary art" (The Wall Street Journal).
Chicago Tribune
At once a haunting evocation of life's inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings And Wakes transforms every experience into the heroic and the universal. It is a testament to the remarkable gift of a literary master writing at the peak of her story telling powers. A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"As rendered through Ms. McDermott's rich, supple prose, and infused with her quiet emotional wisdom, the story of these three children and their family assumes a kind of mythic resonance: it becomes a parable about all families and all families' encounters with love, mortality, and sorrow."—The New York Times "A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author."—Chicago Tribune "McDermott's novels can't be relegated to plot or thematic conceit. It is the sweep of her sentences, many of them as luxurious and sure of themselves as a cat stretching in the sun. And it is the remarkable microscopic attention to humanity—the private gestures and telltale routines that make us who we are."—The Boston Sunday GlobeSan Francisco Chronicle
A haunted, troubled, beautifully articulated journey into the past.Chicago Tribune
At once a haunting evocation of life's inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings And Wakes transforms every experience into the heroic and the universal. It is a testament to the remarkable gift of a literary master writing at the peak of her story telling powers. A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author.Newsweek
It's hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book... you'll find yourself reading every word of Alice McDermott's new novel, not because it's complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the sentences.Publishers Weekly -
This nuanced, elegiac and emotionally charged evocation of a close-knit Irish Catholic family--a BOMC selection in cloth--spent five weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list.Library Journal
Set in the '60s, McDermott's third novel tells the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. The poignant middle-aged romance that develops between the aunt, a former nun, and her suitor, a shy mailman, exacerbates already pronounced family tensions. As they listen to oft-repeated stories about poverty, disease, and early deaths, the children are solemn witnesses to the Irish immigrant experience in America. By turns wry and sad, is was McDermott's finest novel to date. -- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence College, Kingston, OntarioLibrary Journal
Set in the '60s, McDermott's third novel tells the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. The poignant middle-aged romance that develops between the aunt, a former nun, and her suitor, a shy mailman, exacerbates already pronounced family tensions. As they listen to oft-repeated stories about poverty, disease, and early deaths, the children are solemn witnesses to the Irish immigrant experience in America. By turns wry and sad, is was McDermott's finest novel to date. -- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence College, Kingston, OntarioSchool Library Journal
Complex family relationships are explored from the viewpoint of three children whose mother takes them on a weekly trip to her childhood home in Brooklyn to visit Momma, their martyred grandmother, and three aunts: Veronica, an overprotected recluse; Agnes, a sophisticated career woman; and May, a sweet former nun whose marriage and death are foretold in the title. The visits are rituals during which the youngsters, obviously adored by the women, are nonetheless absent-mindedly ignored by all except May. Over the predictable meal, the adults indulge in lamentations and vague complaints related to Momma's tragic past and the unsatisfactory marriage of the children's parents. In spare poetic prose, McDermott deftly weaves past and present as seen through the fresh, uncritical eyes of the children. The setting is sensually described in contrasts: the majesty of the Church, the drabness of the Brooklyn apartment, the sterility of suburbia, and the freedom of the family's ocean vacations. -- Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax, VirginiaWall Street Journal
A haunting and masterly work of literary art.Michiko Kakutani
A beautifully wrought novel…about all families and all families' encounters with love, morality, and sorrow.— Michiko KakutaniThe New York Times