Academy Street

February 9, 2015
The debut novel from Costello (The China Factory) begins with Tess Lohan, a child attending her mother’s funeral in Ireland, and crisply shuttles the girl through adolescence and deposits her, now a young woman, in New York City, where she lives with an aunt and wonders what the world has in store for her. In just over 150 pages, Tess’s full life passes by, from her days working as a nurse, to her nights out dancing, and her brief romance with a lawyer bound for the Air Force, which results in the birth of her son, Theo. As a single mother in the 1960s, Tess struggles with family disappointment and social stigmas, yet she soldiers on, raising her son solo, and eventually watches him drift away from her grasp as he grows into a man. Costello works wonders on the page, employing precise prose to craft a resonant narrative out of a rather ordinary lifetime. Though a fateful incident near the novel’s end feels somewhat exploitative and out of character with the rest of the narrative, Tess’s overall story—full of struggles and meekness—proves there is often beauty to be found in the mundane.

Starred review from February 1, 2015
In this darkly beautiful first novel, a girl finds happiness elusive and short-lived as she comes of age in Ireland and becomes a mother in the U.S. in the last century's latter half.Tess Lohan is 7 when her mother dies in the opening pages, which recall in their capturing of a young person's drifting impressions Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. She notes the Adam and Eve pattern of the wallpaper in her bedroom when a blackbird flies in and tears off a strip for its nest. For a novel generally lean in style, it's a fat image heavy with the toll paid, the Eden lost, for the knowing of good and evil. After training as a nurse, Tess immigrates to New York City, where one night's love leaves her a single mother. Costello wrote of an illegitimate son given up in infancy in one of the fine stories from her first book, The China Factory (2012)-"there was nothing sweeter, ever, in her life after that." For Tess, motherhood "turned a plain world to riches," bringing a taste of joy and then a bundle of pain, a boy who rejects her in resentment of the absent, oblivious father. When he moves out, "[h]er rooms could barely endure the silence left in his wake." In the final pages, as Tess in her 60s revisits Ireland for the first time, the wallpaper returns because her family home has been razed, "the Garden of Eden...toppled by a wrecking ball." And in prose that recalls the peroration of Joyce's "The Dead," she realizes there will be no Eden, "[j]ust time, and tasks made lighter by the memory of love, and days like all others." Costello renders her homely, knowing heroine with craft and compassion in this sad, slim, rich novel.

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December 1, 2014

When Tess Lohan is seven, living on a 1950s western Ireland estate, her mother passes away, and a household once loving deteriorates into grim, resentful silences. For a time, Tess loses her voice, which enhances her capacity for quiet. Though she's a gifted listener, Tess never discovers how to express the enormity of how and what she feels. This inward silence accompanies her to convent school; to Dublin, where she begins a nursing career; and in 1962 to the United States, where she falls in love with David, a handsome lawyer from Dublin. With him, Tess conceives Theo, a magical boy who will grow up fatherless and increasingly bitter toward his mother. While Tess's gifts for feeling draw people to her, then pushes them away, her sad, lonely life is authentic and beautiful. VERDICT In this gemlike first novel, Costello shows her Irish roots; the imagery--light-filled absences, wells, birds--calls to mind Seamus Heaney's poetry and her plot and characters Colm Toibin's brilliant Brooklyn. Throughout, the language is measured and clear, and Tess is ultimately accessible and credible to a wide range of readers.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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