Books & Collections

Editor’s Note on the Review

Kirkus identifies the three pressures that hold this novel in tension: Irish Catholic inheritance, the Thoreauvian inward gaze, and a child’s second sight. What the reviewer calls a “fairy tale grounded in history” is the book’s central craft — folklore and 1970s Boston are not staged in turns but braided, so that grief, queer awakening, and the visible dead occupy the same sentence. The praise for Aiden’s voice points to the book’s deepest technical decision: a child narrator whose register is at once colloquial and quietly literary, capable of holding both a grandmother’s kleptomania and a line from Yeats without seam.

Editor’s Note on the Review

Kirkus has located the book’s real subject: the slow, half-comic theology of a woman who refuses both belief and unbelief and chooses instead to keep asking. The reviewer’s wariness about the “bare-bones plot” is, read another way, a notice of method: the novel is built less by event than by recurrence, returning Molly to the same questions across decades so that the reader feels time pass the way Molly does — through repetition rather than incident. The book belongs to a particular tradition of Catholic-haunted American comedy, and the review’s emphasis on voice is the right emphasis.

Editor’s Note on the Review

What this review names well is the book’s populated quality. Mulhern is a writer of crowds — faith healers, grandmothers, neighbours, drifters — and the novel’s mood depends on no single one of them being a type. Phillips’s recognition of Molly as vulnerable beneath her composure points to the book’s emotional layering: the supernatural premise (the Angel-of-Death pronouncement) is never allowed to override the realism of an ordinary girl learning that life will not be explained to her in advance.

Editor’s Note on the Award

The Wishing Shelf panel is composed of working readers and book clubs rather than trade critics, which makes its endorsement particular: it speaks to a novel’s readability and emotional traction in the hand. That a book so steeped in Irish folklore, Catholic guilt, and the second sight should carry to a British lay readership at all is itself a small statement about its reach — the regional textures hold across the Atlantic because the underlying questions (family, belief, the dead who will not leave) are not regional.

Editor’s Note on the Review

Kirkus correctly places this collection in the O’Connor lineage — the moral irony, the grotesque turned to grace — while also catching the Joycean inheritance: epiphany staged at low volume, almost in passing. The reviewer’s preference for “the quieter scenes” is a useful key to reading Mulhern at large: the louder set-pieces are not the work, only its weather. The work is the sentence-by-sentence attention to ordinary lives the rest of the culture has stopped noticing.