The Comet Seekers

Starred review from August 29, 2016
Former research physicist Sedgwick mines the mysteries of the solar system and human desire to craft a haunting and wonderfully ethereal debut novel about first loves, inescapable loss, and the search for one’s place in a complicated world. When Róisín, an Irish scientist studying comets, and François, a French chef, reunite at a research base in the frigid wilds of Antarctica in 2017, the two seem virtually broken because of their respective pasts. Róisín, who followed her intergalactic studies from Ireland and France to Hawaii and New York over the course of decades, spent just as many years trying to make sense of and move beyond an illicit relationship with her cousin Liam. François arrived at the base with his own baggage: Severine, his dying mother, had insisted throughout her life that the ghosts of her ancestors are real. Sedgwick tackles a centuries-spanning interconnected narrative by placing each chapter within the context of a comet’s appearance in the sky. The sections that chronicle Severine’s conversations with her dearly departed are marked by their magical realism, but those that explore Róisín and Liam’s star-crossed romance are the standouts, both quietly moving and delicately portrayed. Uniquely structured and stylistically fascinating, the multilayered story comes full circle in a denouement that is both heartbreaking and satisfying.

Haunted characters struggle to find fulfillment.In her ambitious but flawed debut novel, journalist, editor, and former research physicist Sedgwick leaps through time, from 1066 to the present, following the trajectories of her characters' lives as various comets surge gloriously through the night skies. She focuses on four main characters: cousins Roisin and Liam are star-crossed lovers both because of their consanguinity and their unbridgeable differences. Roisin, an astronomer, wants to travel the world researching the cosmos; Liam is committed to staying on his family's farm. The second pair is a mother and son, Severine and Francois. Even as a child, Francois longed to explore far-off places, from South American jungles to Antarctica's "wild emptiness"; but Severine will not leave their native Bayeux, France, because she is surrounded there by 11 ghosts from her family's long past. These ghosts are the novel's liveliest characters: playful, teasing, and so comforting that Severine cannot live without them; they are more crucial to her than Francois. "Why should she have to choose," she asks herself, "between her ghosts and her son?" Among the ghosts, Severine is especially attached to her grandmother, "who everyone thought was crazy, who made the world come alive, whose smile made Severine feel special, and loved." Because Granny's ghost treats her like a child, Severine seems infantilized--or, maybe, crazy. Francois can hardly make sense of his strange mother. Rather than allowing her characters to evolve, Sedgwick belabors their predicaments in chapter after chapter. The image of shooting stars suggests a theme: as Roisin explains, "All those stars we see...they're dead already. They have exploded, rejected everything that they were, and the raw components, the elements they were made of, that is where life comes from." But this idea of transformation is only barely hinted at, and, except for Severine, the characters persist in sadness.Unlike shooting stars, Sedgwick's yearning protagonists seem unable or unwilling to "shower the world with light." COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2016
Irish astronomer Roisin comes to Antarctica to watch for a disintegrating comet, worldwide travel being something she embraces. Base-camp chef Francois has just left Bayeux, France, for the second time in his life. Both are ducking tragedy, and they launch a passionate affair, unaware that their bond magically goes back centuries. Sedgwick has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

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