Reviews for After This

The average rating for After This based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-16 00:00:00 Jeff Holzimn I love my dark stories of serial killers, disturbing psychological tweaks, and things that go bump in the night.  There was none of that in this book, but I liked it anyway.  Instead, we have the Keane family - mother, father, and four kids.  The ups and downs of life.  No dramatic twists or turns, just lives being lived as most of us do.  Of steno pools (shorthand, anyone?), Walter Cronkite, and rabbit ear antennas fashioned with a wire hangers and aluminum foil, it brought back memories aplenty.  Parents who were 'identically boring', '...the snag of disappointment', '...the failure to connect', '...the sorrow of a lost opportunity'.  Loneliness.  The observation that as we grow older, the world becomes less familiar rather than more so.  And a question as to whether prayer is nothing more than wishful thinking.        This is my first experience with this author, and I liked the way she did things.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-02 00:00:00 Petra Widmann Times change. People change. And no matter how we rearrange the furniture around that notion, we can never step aside of the truth. That curl of our hair, the snorting laugh, the gait of our walk, the tall and the small, and the testy temperment. Shaken and stirred, we are who we are. Alice McDermott sets her story down among the familiar bungalows of twentieth century Long Island. John and Mary Keane met and married before the leaves even had time to turn color. And four children seemed to follow quickly before roots burrowed into that earth. You left the confines of your childhood abode and lit the match under another of your own. Was it to replicate the familiar or was it to escape the mundane? McDermott introduces us to the Keane children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Clare. As their stories unfolded, I almost had the feeling of a pinball effect. Social, political, and spiritual experiences bounced off of them as the ball hit repeatedly reminding us of the signposts of the times. They each seemed to bend in the direction of the social upheavals of the era: birth control, abortions, women's rights, Vietnam, and so on. Was this truly the flow of this storyline or were the characters simply molded to fit the premise? I was drawn into the superb writing of Alice McDermott through her latest book, The Ninth Hour. I grabbed, Someone, almost immediately with great satisfaction as well. But this one seems to lack the flow and the depth of these aforementioned books. McDermott is known for her detail, but detail seemed to swallow this storyline up. Don't get me wrong. It is still an excellent read. I don't think that I'll be ranking it as high on McDermott reads. Many have rated it much higher. Perhaps it touched a special somewhere within.