Tag: Frank Delaney

The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney turned out to be a mammoth read that took me far longer than I expected. I received my copy, an advanced uncorrected proof – without the lovely cover I’ve shown here – courtesy of Meier, the marketing company. It’s a story of journeys, of love and romance, and of war and mystery. I should have loved it, but I didn’t.

It’s narrated by Ben McCarthy looking back on his life as he tells his story to his children. Set during World War II, Ben, still grieving after the disappearance of his wife Venetia ten  years earlier, is travelling around Ireland collecting folklore and trying to find out what has happened to her. He meets Kate Begley, known as the Matchmaker of Kenmare and they become friends. Ireland was neutral during the war but that didn’t stop Ben and Kate’s involvement, after Kate’s husband Charles Miller, an American soldier is reported killed in action. I found it hard to get interested in the story at the beginning and in fact stopped reading it for a while. It was slow to get going and I had to keep looking back trying to work out what was happening and who was who. It didn’t help that this book follows on from a previous one that I haven’t read, which tells the story of Venetia’s mysterious disappearance.

It gathered pace for a while as Kate and Ben travelled to Europe trying to find Charles, who Kate refuses to believe is dead, and into the war action. And there is plenty of action when they are captured by the Germans, despite their Irish neutrality. Even though the war is coming to an end they are in desperate danger. This is, I think, the best part of the book, full of tension and pace. Neutrality is a theme throughout the book. As Frank Delaney writes in his Author’s Note:

… the word neutrality has many shades. For example official papers, released long after 1945, show that Ireland did, in fact, exploit the war politically and contributed many actions to the Allied cause. As to affairs of the heart, who would ever dare to define where friendship should end and passion begin?

Did Ben eventually find out what happened to Venetia and was Charles really dead? I read on, and on, and on as Kate and Ben continued to search for Charles after the war ended. The section where Kate stands waiting for the troops returning from the war, hoping to find Charles amongst them was very moving. But I became tired of their searches and by the time I came to the section where they are travelling to Lebanon in Kansas, the centre of America, the episode with a giraffe and small pig was almost too much to believe. It had all the trappings of a “tall tale”.

Overall, I did enjoy most of it. The book rambles along with many diversions from the main story, some amusing like Neddy who hires a set of false teeth, ‘a set of tombstone dentures’ to make him more attractive to a prospective wife, but mostly I found them distracting. It has a mythic quality. Ben was taught to view his life as though it were a myth, a legend and there are many hints all the way through of the tragic events that are about to unfold – too many hints, I thought, which meant that there were few if any surprises.  Interspersed with Ben’s narration are excerpts from Kate’s journal and his own journal and yet at times the text read more as an objective rather than a personal narrative.

Here is a book trailer featuring Frank Delaney reading from his book.

I agree with Dorothy in her review at Books and Bicycles, in which she says ‘The book would have worked better if told in a more direct manner, without all the editorializing from the older version of Ben and that it ‘does have its pleasures ‘” as you can imagine, the love triangle that develops between Kate, Ben, and Charles is consistently interesting ‘”unfortunately, the quality of the writing kept interfering with the fun.’

And for a more favourable review see Karen’s post on her Cornflower Books blog – ‘it’s a beautifully pitched, fluent story of charm, humour and some inspired ‘“ and even Homeric ‘“ touches.’

The Matchmaker of Kenmare

  • Hardcover: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Random House USA Inc (1 April 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1400067847
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400067848
  • Source: free review copy

This is my second book for the Ireland Reading Challenge.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This week I’ve finished reading two crime fiction books:

and posts on these books will be on my blog this coming week.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcast: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. So far I’ve been reading about Bronson Alcott and his unorthdox ideas about educating and bringing up children.  It was quite a coincidence I thought, when I was reading the Daily Express in the coffee shop recently and came across a review of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. The reviewer describes this book as a

… richly textured history of the life and times of a back’‘to’‘nature community in 19th-century America. It was called Fruitlands, though Fruitcakes would have been more apt.
(Read more from this review.)

I haven’t got up to this venture so far in Eden’s Outcasts. There are many entries in the index under ‘Fruitlands’ so I expect to find out much more about it. His career as a teacher was not a success and it seems that his venture into communal farming wasn’t either.

I spent other reading time this week downloading more books onto my Kindle and have read the opening paragraphs of most of them. It really is so easy to get carried away and add more books to my to-be-read lists! But I only bought one book this week, so that’s not too bad.

It’s Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and it’s been on my wish list for a long time. I read fairly quickly and know that I often read too quickly to take in all the detail. Prose writes that reading quickly can be ‘a hindrance‘ and that it is ‘essential to slow down and read every word‘. She also contradicts the advice to novice writers ‘to show, not tell‘, when ‘the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language‘. Using Alice Munro’s short story Dulse as an example, she says:

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

Most interesting, I thought.

I still haven’t got used to Kindle’s use of locations as opposed to page numbers – the extract above is from Location 409 – 12. Nor have I mastered the technique of transferring my highlighted passages and notes from the Kindle to the computer!

I’m also reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. This is an Advance Uncorrected Proof; the book is scheduled to be on sale on 8 February. It’s the first book I’ve read by Delaney, described by the publisher as a

… lush and surprising historical novel, rich as a myth, tense as a thriller …

From what I’ve read of it so far I’d go along with that description, except for the tenseness – but it’s early days yet. It’s set in 1943 in Ireland, a neutral country in the Second World War. It’s a long book and takes its time in setting the scene and introducing the characters. It promises well.