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Annie Dunne

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I invariably end up going back to authors who simply know how to tell a good story without being too showy. Sensitive and alive with beauty, fear, anxiety, and love – I would highly recommend this family saga to everyone who enjoys an in-depth character study that explores the heights and depths of a person living a simple life of great complexity.

While this is not a plot driven story, the way he creates the characters and peels back a corner at a time to give you a glimpse at their motivations and inner lives is wonderful. When Annie’s nephew and his wife are set to go to London to find work their two small children a little boy and his older sister are brought down to spend the summer with their grand-aunt. Annie's passionate observations and shifting moods-rendered in dense prose that's close to poetry-fuel this fine novel.Barry brings to life the insecurity of a humpbacked woman who must depend on others for a home and who pays fof the privilege of half a bed and daily food by backbreaking labor. She is shy and struggles to communicate well, leading to difficult conversations in which she can’t express herself. On the one hand AD is a convoluted tale set in a specific time and place, briskly told without coyness or shame, circling themes of universal significance involving difficult and rather unpleasant people in difficult and often unpleasant circumstances. The interesting thing is that the childrens’ father is Annie’s nephew, who she helped to raise after his mother (Annie’s sister) had some sort of nervous breakdown when her kids were young. The book describes the events of the summer as Annie delights in playing the role of a mother, but also feels threatened by the prospect of her cousin marrying a local farmhand, thus leaving her homeless once again.

Goldie Hawn is Joanna Stayton, filthy rich and insufferable, until she meets a carpenter (Kurt Russell) who rescues her, but she has amnesia. Neither woman has ever married – Sarah because she feels she is ugly and Annie because she had polio as a child, leaving her with a deformity in her back – or has had children. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. I like the story because it is beautifully written, is evocative of nature and beauty, is emotionally honest, and because I care about the characters.

How my heart went out to you as you told me your stories – past and present – and how the future held such strong fears for you. At one point Maud became disabled and Annie was responsible for all of the housework, and farm work that woman did, in addition to raising the three boys. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. Written from Annie’s perspective, the book depicts her anxieties, feelings, and memories during her loveless and unfulfilled life. Like that book, it is filled with the most exquisite prose that makes you want to re-read sentences and paragraphs just for the joy of it.

The lifestyle on Sara’s tiny farm was one the city-bred youngsters adored, and Annie felt the same way. Their presence stirs Annie’s memories and sensibilities, and heightens her awareness of the vulnerability of her age. The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barry's magnificent play about the last days of the former Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, was a big success when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1995.Annie provided me with invaluable information for my food business and also provided me with strategies to help planning going forward. Perhaps the existence of a new and more prosperous Ireland, or the fast evolution in the rural area where I live, made me feel less compelled by the change of dirt roads being paved.

Although it's set in the 1950s you never get any real indication of that time so that it's almost as if time is standing still and only now and again do you get a sense that things are moving on in the "outside world" and that Annie's way of life will become a distant memory but one that still lingers in the shadows and unkept fields of rural Ireland. Gabe Hudson's first book is an acutely inventive collection of seven short stories and a novella, all of them related to the Persian Gulf war in one way or another, but none bearing any resemblance to what we saw on CNN. In the movies, Annies are always: cute/pretty/beautiful; perky/down-to-earth; inquisitive to intelligent/well-read; loyal/wholesome; a perfect woman for a good man. Never one to fit in socially, she’s developed a rich inner life, and it’s her interior monologue, her thoughts, both good and bad, ugly and unflinching, which make up the prose of this book. I enjoyed the character of Annie Dunne; her interior dialogue; her joy in the simple things and in the nature around her; and her half-acceptance of the changes in the world around her.Annie is left without a role, or a permanent place in the world, and society's restrictions make it hard for her to find one. There is also an undercurrent of bewilderment about the presence of children in this world of disillusioned adults--can Annie even know what innocence is any longer? This passage, written about Annie's brother, Willie, who died in WWI, sums up their dilemma perfectly: "He died in the mud like a beast for us, our Willie, so that everything could continue as before, and despite that he did that, and gave his life, it never did. Complicating the events of the summer spanned by the plot are the two young children left in Annie's care by her nephew, who's gone off to London. The one fly in the ointment is Billy Kerr, the handyman who works for their other cousins and who, sometimes, does work for Annie and Sarah.

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