July 13, 2009
Loehfelm follows Fresh Kills
(2008), which won Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award, with another novel that mines the emotional dynamics of family relationships, if with fewer thrills. Kevin Curran, a history teacher at a Staten Island community college, is surprised when his younger brother, Danny, turns up after years spent on the street as a drug addict. Danny, who's kicked his habit but is now working for a local crime kingpin, persuades Kevin to help him dig up several bodies buried on the grounds of the long-abandoned Bloodroot Children's Hospital, a horrifying concentration camp–like institution for kids from which Danny was adopted. Soon Kevin finds himself enmeshed in a complicated plan involving an illegal property development project. The action gets moving in the final pages, but by then some readers will feel they know a lot about Kevin and Danny but not enough about the evil scientists and unspeakable crimes associated with Bloodroot.
August 15, 2009
A burned-out college instructor reunites with his brother, falls in love and skirts the Mafia in a novel teetering on the border between thriller and family drama.
Loehfelm (Fresh Kills, 2008, etc.) finds in blue-collar Staten Island the sort of desolation Dennis Lehane mines in south Boston. He sees people leading desperate lives among"the weathered houses, crooked on wasted plots and afire with borrowed light." Once a promising history instructor at Richmond City College, Kevin Curran now leans on old lesson plans and puts off grading papers. Kevin snaps to when brother Danny shows up after a three-year absence, claiming he's beaten his heroin addiction. But Danny is hardly in the clear; he's doing electronic spying and other errands for the owner of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. Danny engages Kevin for one such errand, the gruesome disposal of some bodies in a landfill. For their efforts, the restaurant owner hands the men two envelopes, each stuffed with five Gs. Will Kevin follow the Mafia money trail or turn from his brother? Blood ties prevail, advises Kelsey Reyes, a colleague with whom Kevin becomes romantically linked. Her observation points a clear symbolic path to Bloodroot, the notorious Staten Island hospital where a quarter-century ago doctors subjected children, Danny perhaps among them, to inhuman physical and psychological abuse. Danny supports his boss, who wants the Bloodroot site turned into a public park; the project would generate lucrative construction contracts. But Kevin's dean wants the shuttered facility turned into a museum. Danny enlists Kevin to block the dean's effort by hacking into his computer files as this portrait of fraternal bonds moves to a forced action climax. Despite Loehfelm's earnest gestures towards Deeper Meaning, not to mention a decidedly grim ending, this dark tale lacks the impact of tragedy. Characters are defined by little more than their basic conflicts and objectives, and passages of sharp, sensate prose too often give way to flat, overwrought writing.
Promising, though uneven.
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Starred review from August 1, 2009
Staten Island history professor Kevin Curran feels responsible for the loss of his wild younger brother, Danny. He doesnt know if Danny is alive or dead; he simply knows that he disappeared three years before into the netherworld of New York Citys drug addicts. When Danny reappears, healthy and apparently prosperous, Kevin is overjoyed, but Danny soon lets Kevin in on some very dark secrets. Eventually, Kevin finds himself shaken to his diffident core by the things he does out of filial loyalty. Like Fresh Kills (2008), Loehfelms highly praised debut, Bloodroot bursts the boundary of the crime genre. Theres plenty of crime, but the book is also an insightful psychological tale of family; loss and love; tragedies, past and imminent; and redemption. Staten Island, the least-celebrated of New Yorks boroughs, becomes a dark, mysterious, and portentous place in Loehfelms often-elegant prose. All the major characters are strikingly realized and wont soon be forgotten. Nor will readers forget Bloodroot, a hospital for children with mental and physical disabilities that Loehfelm patterned on Staten Islands real-life Willowbrook Hospital, where the neglect and abuse patients suffered for several decades made horrific headlines in the 1970s. Bloodroot deserves to be a breakout best-seller for its talented author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)