Reviews for We are the Brennans / (BOOK)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Shame and miscommunication drive wedges between loving siblings at turning points in their lives. The Irish American family of the title runs a successful pub bearing their name in a small New York town. They’re close-knit, but most of them keep shameful secrets from each other. Father Mickey worries he has dementia (and has never talked about his past Irish Republican Army connections); oldest son Denny is stressed because he’s about to open a second pub for which he has borrowed a lot of money via sketchy methods and because his wife has moved out. His brothers, artistic Jackie and Shane, who’s intellectually disabled but a hardworking bundle of energy, are both haunted by the abrupt and mysterious departure to California five years ago of their sister, Sunday. Now she’s home, recuperating from a drunken car wreck but enigmatic as ever, which is really stressing out Denny’s best friend and business partner, Kale Collins, who is also Sunday’s former fiance. He might have moved on to marriage and fatherhood, but the torch he carries for Sunday is hot enough to burn down both their houses. Lange builds the plot by switching to a different character’s point of view in each chapter, giving the reader angles on events that are sometimes intriguingly different. The Brennan men, including Kale, who pretty much grew up with them, rally around Sunday when she’s threatened, although they do have a touch of toxic masculinity, tending to think of violent revenge as a solution, and sometimes acting on it. The Brennan matriarch, Maura, has been dead for several years when the story begins, but her influence plays a surprising role. The Brennans find redemption, but Lange doesn’t wrap things up too neatly—some of those old secrets have new echoes. A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
