Nick Laird

On Kit's birthday, she receives a guinea pig.When Kit leaves for school, "the Surprise" is surrounded by her other pets: a dog, a cat, and a bird. Collectively, they decide she's an oddball, and the Surprise is sad. She tries to find ways to be like the others; she attaches balloons to herself so she can fly...and she flies right out the window. Luckily, Emily Brookstein catches her, cares for her, and returns her to Kit just in time. With new perspective, and a new name, Maud is accepted by the other pets, who soften their rigid schedule to allow for some new ideas.

Excellent endpapers show a sepia cross-section of an apartment building with its inhabitants (people and animals), plants, and decorations; different on front and back.

Charming.

See also: Alfie by Thyra Heder… (meer)

Modern Gods (2017) by Nick Laird. This novel suffers from a split personality that left me feeling uncertain as to what the book was about. Was it an exploration of a dysfunctional Irish family? Was it a look into “Cargo” cults in and about Papua New Guinea (PNG)? Was it an examination of how religions battle over who has the “correct” path to eternal salvation? And as an added bonus, what was the opening scene of gun violence to do with the rest of the story?
We mainly focus on the The Donnelly family of Northern Ireland. There is something wrong with every one of them, and each of these wrongs colors the story. The seemingly most normal of the bunch is the father, Ken, who owns the family realty business and doesn’t seem to like anyone. Judith is the wife who has a growth enlarging within her that seems inoperable. The son is sleeping with his best friend’s wife while the younger daughter is getting ready for her second marriage. It is this event that pulls Liz, the eldest child, back from America where she just caught her live-in boyfriend sleeping with another man.
Almost two thirds of the novel centers about the complaints of this group, which are bad but not terrible, but things erupt the day after the wedding. It seems that the opening gun violence is directly aligned with the groom, automatically shifting the aspect of the novel.
And then it shifts again in the next chapter. Directly after the wedding, Liz is on her way to New Ulster in PNG, there to host a BBC documentary about the world’s newest religion. A lot happens in the days to come, Liz’s eyes are opened to new concepts, ideas are dashed and reconstructed and the reader is left to figure out many things by themselves.
What I drew from all this was, well I’m not certain. Was this story to be family troubles after the Troubles that plagued the North for so long. Or was this more about religion and how destructive it is. We have the missionaries working with the local government in an effort to destroy this new cult. We have Protestant vs. Catholic violence, even conflicts among the members of the family and the family against the community.
My bet is on the woes inflicted upon us all in the name of religion. My version of God is better than your version of the same God. Modern Gods appears to bean attempt to illustrate just how corruptive religion is and can be.
Well written with characters who live and breath, Modern Gods is a book that demands to be read more than once to find the depths of meaning it offers.… (meer)