May 2, 2011
Pears (In the Place of Fallen Leaves) opens his robust, resonant novel with a car accident on a Birmingham, England, roadway that claims the life of six-year-old Sara Ithell and costs her father, Owen, his right hand before backtracking to Owen's childhood in the early 1970s at the mercy of an absent father and a feeble mother. His best memories are of days spent on his grandparents' rugged Welsh farm, and he eventually finds happiness after he marries and starts a family with Mel. But after the accident, the happy family swoops into a downward spiral of dejection and painful psychological trauma as a despondent Mel absconds with the two surviving children to another man's home, and, after some obsessive deliberation, Owen kidnaps them from school and sets off on an epic journey of self-discovery and atonement that reveals Owen to be an oppressed and fascinating man forsaken by luck. This impressive, skillful novel portrays love and devotion in a unique, haunting way.
July 1, 2011
In a finely observed if uneven elegy to loss, British writer Pears (In a Land of Plenty, 1998, etc.) tracks the lonely youth and tragic adulthood of a quiet man.
Lyrical and melancholic, the author's latest novel moves at a curious pace, expansive in its vignettes of Owen Ithell's deeply satisfying teenage years helping his grandfather on a Welsh hill farm and later on a sad pilgrimage back to those same hills, but telescopically truncated in between. Via an investigation report, a case study and other perspectives, Pears stitches together the central facts of Owen's life: his happy marriage; contented work as a self-employed landscaper; the arrival of his children; and then the traffic accident in which his oldest child is killed and Owen loses his right hand. His settled life in pieces, his new existence is shaped by alcoholism, unemployment, separation and court orders barring him from his children. Driven by desperation, Owen eventually embarks with his son and daughter on a journey back to the Welsh farm that formed him, an odyssey across the British landscape which Pears charts with obsessive detail and occasional glimpses of the surreal. Rhapsodic in its rural devotion and deftly empathetic in its portrait of Owen, dammed up inside himself, the novel mixes affecting, compassionate moments with sketchiness.
Lovingly crafted but—like its central character—introverted.
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
June 15, 2011
A police report of a car accident and a progress report by an occupational therapist set the scene for a melancholic tale that unfolds as the result of a collision that occurs when the sudden appearance of a dog on the road causes the car to brake sharply and collide with a truck, severing the driver's hand and killing his young daughter. Until that moment, life had been blessed for Owen and his wife, Mel, who are happily married with two children and a third on the way. Having been raised on his grandparents' farm, Owen has learned to be independent and resourceful. Postaccident, his life goes into freefall as Mel blames him for their daughter's death. His phantom limb pain ends his gardening business and leads to alcohol abuse. When Mel discontinues Owen's visitation rights and announces her plans to take the children to Canada, his only hope of seeing them again is to kidnap them. VERDICT Like Cormac McCarthy's The Road without the apocalypse, this story will seize readers' hearts and have them rooting for the survival of a father and his children on the run. Pears (In a Land of Plenty) has produced another strong, sympathetic winner.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 1, 2011
This evocatively written novel tells the sad story of Owen Ithell. After a car accident in which his six-year-old daughter is killed, and he loses a hand, Owen, a loner who had, almost miraculously, found happiness with his wife and children, turns to drink to deal with phantom pain from his lost limb and his inability to find work as a gardener. Increasingly alienated from his wife, he is eventually forced to move out and, lost in a haze of grief and drink, concocts a plan to kidnap his remaining children and take them back to the Welsh hills, where he spent his pivotal, formative years in the company of his taciturn grandfather on a remote sheep farm. As they make their erratic journey via train and foot, foraging for food along the way, Owen struggles to communicate his love for his children and for the land. Pear's descriptions of Owen's childhood spent learning how to catch rabbits, chop wood, and make birdcalls are deeply poetic, vividly rendering his ecstatic connection to the natural world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)