| At Weddings and Wakes |  | Author: Alice McDermott
Publisher: Delta Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Seller: owlsbooks
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 822,070
Media: Paperback
Pages: 213
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0385319851
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385319850
ASIN: 0385319851
Publication Date: January 12, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Telling a story through the eyes of children is a tricky business, which is that much more proof of what a magician Alice McDermott happens to be. At Weddings and Wakes, her engrossing portrayal of love and tragedy in an Irish-Catholic family, takes us along with the kids as they accompany their mother on weekly visits to a world of memory and recrimination in the family's old Brooklyn neighborhood. An exquisitely executed little novel that masks all its hard work and complex structure behind finely wrought lace curtains of craft.
Product Description
Scenes of a family unfold through childrens' eyes in Alice McDermott's extraordinary novel. Here, among family rituals and relationships, love and longing, recriminations and regret, an Irish-Catholic family comes vividly, brilliantly to life.
Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Lucy longs for the ineffable as her sisters grapple with alcohol and absolution and her mother wrestles with the past.
Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun who has vowed to find happiness, blossom with a late and unexpected love....
And the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family: "...like the dead, their presence would be all the more inescapable when they were gone."
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 Worth reading several times November 5, 1999
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Beautifully written and highly evocative, the story stays with you like a childhood memory. The depiction of the father through the children's eyes is marvelous. This is one of my favorite books.
Like Monet January 10, 2004
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
More like a Monet than a photograph, McDermott's, "At Weddings and Wakes" reveals its beauty by memory impressions rather than by the harsh black lines of plot. No less lost than others who have written here in the ebb and flow of the timeline, I, however, trusted the author. And soon I was intermixing with the memories of the book my own childhood memories - and identifying, in the moment, with the joys and tragedies of this family. I dare suggest any who read this book, liking it or not, will find themselves remembering family stories of times past - memories happy and sad, with characters tragic and heroic and possibly rethinking them in the light of McDermott's graceful treatment of such moments. It was an exquiste read. That is, for those who are comfortable with impressions leading you to see clearly the beauty in life's tragedies and joys, as like a Monet painting. But if you need/seek/want the clarity of a photograph for beauty - skip this book.
 a family history through the memories of the children October 23, 2000
jeanne-scott (Asan, Guam)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
At Weddings and Wakes was a very interesting look at the history of a family through the collected (not collective) memories of the children who saw the developments through their child-eyes. The details that are so clear to a child, the sounds,the tastes, the physical feel of things, the lack of conversational detail and nuance, the end results of the day, all give a clean and simple feel to this story. The way that the different children have a slightly different perspective on the same occasion or type of occasion was insightful beyond ordinary reason. The children did not automatically connect one happening in their lives to another. To them there was no trainload of fault and blame to be emptied at every unhappy ( or happy) occurance. Sometimes good things just happen, sometimes bad. They seemed to feel that life just unfolded itself for them to observe it. The simplicity of a childs acceptance of things in their life is accomplished only through the complex thought and the gentle hand of an excellent writer like Alice McDermott. The entire novel was like a walk through the park holding a child's hand, as they open their heart to you completely, trying to help you understand life as they perceive it. Alice McDermott seems to know that it is not the destination but the journey itself that make life worthwhile.
A brilliant evocation of memory. April 25, 1998
Marcia (psorenso@execpc.com) (New Berlin, WI)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
The quality of memory is brilliantly conveyed in this novel: the details, the dreaminess, the layers of knowing - knowing what you knew as a child and what you learned later and what happened after that. The book is a quantity of detail that never becomes claustrophobic. In the opening pages, we have a minute description of the mother, her three children, and their bus ride from Long Island to the city to visit relatives. Without boring the reader, McDermott renders exquisitely how excrutiatingly boring such visits can be for children, who don't understand exactly what's going on among the adults but understand perfectly the tension. Out of this wealth of detail emerges the story of a family, and though thoroughly Irish and Catholic, these are characters recognizable in any family - the beautiful, disappointed one, the one determined to be happy, the adored alcoholic, the smart, embittered one. We see the way family stories take on a life of their own and family problems are more like the air one breathes than explicitly defined events and situations that can be rationally addressed. "Aren't you glad that you only have to see your relatives at weddings and wakes?" says a teenager to her younger cousins. They all agree, but the reader knows the truth - each one of them is a unique product of their common family, as is each one of us.
Proust in the Suburbs August 31, 2003
Kcolorado (Denver, CO United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Reading At Weddings and Wakes is like sharing a dream. Events are described with a crystalline clarity and tone perfect attention to detail, allowing us to be swept into the experience without knowing a lot of history of the characters.Even the names of the people appear only incidentally later in the book. The book unfolds slowly and almost cinematically as three children accompany their mother on a trip to Brooklyn to visit their grandmother and aunts. The pacing of the book is languid and deliberate. Characters appear and disappear, we hear snatches of conversations and recollections of past events. I love McDermott's language and though I am a fast reader, she forces me to slow down because each word is important. I am in absolute awe of her ability to tell a story, without resorting to conventional plot devices. I was so totally engaged with the characters and the situation, perhaps because it so closely mirrored my own experience growing up in an Irish Catholic family. Yet I believe the book transends the particulars of place as it addresses the central issues of life: joy and tragedy, our inability to let go of the past and our need to enjoy the moment. Through the eyes of the children we understand how events become experience, as they observe adults who seem mired in their histories, unable to find joy in the moment and move forward.
The love the children share with their favorite aunt,May, the only adult, apart from their father who is actively seeking happiness and finding joy, is palpable. It is so finely rendered that it brought back in a piercingly acute way, my own feelings for beloved and now departed family members. Other reader reviews makes it clear this isn't a book for everyone, but I will never forget it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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