Because Jack didn’t drive—not stick, not on the left side of the road, not at all ever—Sadie piloted the rental car from the Dublin airport to the wedding, grinding gears and scraping along the greenery and—for a few miles—creeping behind a tractor on a winding road. It was ten p.m. and raining. If Ireland was emerald she couldn’t say. The tractor was a comfort, lit up with white lights, which she planned to follow as long as she could. Till dawn if necessary.
“The Irish Wedding” is the opening story in this collection and it is an appropriate choice because the opening paragraph immediately introduces them to Jack and Sadie. Readers will need to get to know Jack and Sadie unless they are the type to pick and choose in a collection such as this and avoid those which don’t immediately grab their attention. The collection is comprised of a dozen stories, but this couple—Jack and Sadie—will start from and pop up in nearly half those twelve tales before the back cover is closed. There will doubtlessly be a contingent of readers wishing the author had just waited until she found another half dozen story ideas for the couple so that she could publish an entire collection focusing simply on them. Most readers will find them among the more memorable and engaging characters. A few will likely find them tedious by the third or fourth encounter, but those readers can be consoled by remembering that slightly more than half the book does not feature Jack and Sadie.
The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle.
Not every reader is built for an audio version of a book and not every book is really built for listening rather than and reading and not every story in a collection of short stories is equally effective when listened to. One can imagine that listening to this particular story is an entirely different sort of experience than reading silent to oneself and this particular quote is just one reason why. One sentence, composed of sixteen words of which a form of “grackle” represents fully one-fourth of those words. And if you think this is simply an effective strategy of repetition slotted in near the end for that purpose, consider that the opening paragraph uses either the singular or plural form of “grackle” six times. “Grackle” appears more often over the course of this not particularly long story more times than most people could probably ever keep count. Reading it likely doesn’t convey that repetition as much as listening to the story being read in audiobook version. Which makes this story a particularly excellent choice for some kind of analytical paper focusing on the fundamental differences in experience between reading and listening to a story.
What he had loved about watching her on the boat: the hot cider of her voice against the dry toast of Willie Shavers’s, her measured exasperation with him. No: what he loved was big Willie Shavers himself, the glass eyes that looked from side to side, his levering eyebrows, the mystery of his mouth with its stiff lips and painted tongue.
At this late point in the game, it just may simply be a case that there aren’t that many original ways to craft a story about a ventriloquist and their dummy which hasn’t already been done. (For those interesting in such stories, check out the episode of Murdoch Mysteries title “Belly Speaker” to see how it’s done.) And, of course, read this story which also shows how it is done, though in a much—a much—different way. Most writers automatically leap to the psychological foundation of self-identity and the convenience of dissociative identity to plumb the possibilities of the story about the ventriloquist and dummy. (“Belly Speaker” being a prime example of how there is still fuel left for those writers with a clever enough imagination.) Here we have a writer who eschews that easy path to stake out an interest in something that just quite simply is off the beaten track from the long and rich history of this particular trope. Just when you thought there was nothing new under the sun in the world of the weird relationship between belly speaker and their dolls, along comes something like “A Splinter” to remind other writers that no subject has been completely explored.
