Someone

This was meditative and lovely, punctuated by moments when McDermott really captures the cruel shocks of life and our various bumbling responses to them. Like this (and, despite this quote, the novel wasn't depressing!): "The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief."

3.5 stars. Life, death, and everything in between as experienced by a quiet Irish Catholic girl living in Brooklyn between World Wars. Unlike the events of [b:Absolution 101404407 Absolution Alice McDermott https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1678678178l/101404407.SY75.jpg 124892367], which was set in 1960s Vietnam, there is nothing extraordinary about Marie's life. But through McDermott's subtle yet powerful prose, Marie becomes Someone.