From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When a dull neighbor asks Hannah Luckraft what she does for a living, Hannah can barely refrain from answering honestly: "Oh, a little theft, monstrosity, credit-card fraud, and my hobbies include giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while I'm semi-unconscious. I also drink a lot." With her fifth novel, Kennedy proves herself—again—to be a master of extracting searing beauty from patently ugly truths. Awash in whisky, 30-year-old narrator Hannah is the consummate professional screwup: she drinks with ferocity and harbors no pretenses about her self-destructive impulses or their horrendous consequences. Her wry, wary commentary has no right to be anything but gut-wrenchingly sad, yet her savage wit and chilling self-awareness transform even unspeakable misery into something howlingly funny. Blacking out becomes "master[ing] the art of escaping from linear time," rehab is reduced to "being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss [our] personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires" and paradise itself is revealed to be "an untouched bottle and the man who loves me, the man I love." Of course, Hannah knows that happiness can't last, so when a charming drunk named Robert stumbles into her life, her bed and her head, no one dares to hope for a happy ending. Their thirst for oblivion, sobriety and oblivion again is the story of paradise found and lost a thousand times over. "How it happens is a long story, always," but rarely is it so jaw-droppingly good as this.
(Mar. 14) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The seductive pain and sinister pleasures of alcoholism have rarely been more powerfully depicted than in Kennedy's profound and provocative tale of one woman's descent into despair, oblivion, and madness. Approaching 40, fitfully employed, and estranged from her family, Hannah is a hapless denizen of local pubs, hotel bars, airport lounges--anywhere she can score a drink. Her best friends are Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels, their golden hues her source of sunlight, their shiny labels more precious than jewels. And they're even more delightful when enjoyed with Robert, a fellow alcoholic whose love Hannah needs almost as badly as she does the booze. The cause of Hannah's alcoholism is never clear, but what matters is that any attempts at sobriety, whether self-imposed or enforced, only serve to heighten and hasten Hannah's relentless spiral toward an abyss. Suffering paralyzing blackouts and petrifying hallucinations, Hannah is out of control. In Kennedy's masterful hands, however, such torment is the stuff of poetry. There's humor amid the horror of Hannah's dissolution, a sublime pathos balanced by a gritty realism, in which Kennedy continually astounds the reader with her language.
Carol HaggasCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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