Reviews for Modern gods
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
The gripping opening of Modern Gods describes the carnage unleashed in a bar by two gunmen. Years after that 1993 massacre, the Donnelly family will find they are unexpectedly connected to what happened that day. Laird has a rare gift for writing as though merely opening a window onto lives that existed before and will continue after his story ends. Alison Donnelly is about to marry for the second time, having divorced her drunk of a husband shortly after their second child was born. Unlike her sister Liz, she has stayed in their hardscrabble hometown in Northern Ireland. Liz went on to pursue anthropology, finding moderate success after watering down her thesis to appeal to the masses. Liz is then summoned to host a show for the BBC about a new religion with a charismatic leader, located on an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. In this evocative and psychologically profound novel, both sisters, at home and far afield, confront the possibility that the beliefs they have carefully built up for themselves may be hollow.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
An anthropologist explores a cargo cult in Papua New Guinea while her family back in Ireland struggles with a shocking revelation.Liz, the hero of Laird's third novel (Glover's Mistake, 2009, etc.), is an academic who's unlucky in love; as the story opens she's caught her boyfriend with another man. Luckily, she's written a successful book that gives a self-help twist to Claude Levi-Strauss' theories about human behavior, which affords her a chance to escape New York to the Pacific island to host a BBC documentary about the founder of the Story, a quasi-Christian cult. First, though, she needs to visit her hometown in Ireland, where her sister, Allison, is getting married again. Her first husband was an abuser, but only after the nuptials does everybody discover that her second, Stephen, is worse: he was a shooter in an Irish Republican Army terrorist attack on a bar that killed five people. The novel alternates from Ireland to PNG, and there are some clear surface parallels: the home of the Story is called New Ulster, and Belef, the leader of the cargo cult, is in a dispute with the local mainline Christian group that echoes the Catholic-Protestant split during the Troubles. But the novel still feels like two tonally different novels imperfectly stitched together, one a Paul Theroux-esque exploration of a foreign land from an outsider perspective, the other a more Anne Enright-ish domestic study mainly concerned with Allison pressing Stephen to reckon with his past. Only occasionally does Laird oversell the connection between the two threads ("This family is like a cult we all follow but nobody remembers why!" Allison exclaims). But though faith and family remain topic A throughout, the dramas and circumstances on Ireland and PNG are so different that the connection feels forced. Two intriguing storylines that, like feuding family members, have a hard time talking to one another. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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Pulling from the real-life events of 1993, when a young supporter of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a British loyalist paramilitary organization, shot up a small pub in Northern Ireland, Laird has written a truly superb novel exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness. Protestant Kenneth and Judith Donnelly live in Ulster. They have three adult children: Liz has been living somewhat unhappily in the States after finishing her Ph.D. in anthropology; Allison has two small children and is planning to marry a mysterious local man whose background she hasn't pushed to understand; and Spencer has a big secret of his own. Gathering at their parents' house for Allison's wedding, the family will have to confront the suddenly very personal echoes of the "troubles" of the past. Liz, meanwhile, will leave after the ceremony, on her own journey to a small island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where she'll be working on a BBC documentary. In a possibly heavy-handed move, Laird sends Liz to New Ulster, drawing a parallel between the two islands, thousands of miles apart, which seemingly share more than a name. "A lot of violence in these places," Kenneth remarks, as Liz first announces her plans. "Where are 'these places'?" Liz asks in turn, the very question Laird asks of himself and his readers. Though Liz's experiences are salient, its Allison's fate, thoroughly chilling and unsettling, that is the highlight. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal
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The Donnelly sisters are in big trouble. Liz, a college professor in America who walks in on her indiscreet, much younger boyfriend, accepts a last-minute gig to film a BBC documentary of a new cargo cult religion in an island off the coast of Papua, New Guinea. On the way, she stops off in Ireland to attend the wedding of her younger sister, Alison, mother of two, who is about to marry for the second time with results even more disastrous than her first marriage. Intertwined among these compelling catastrophes are the unbearable last moments of victims of a mass shooting in an Irish pub during the Troubles. Impossible choices threaten to derail both sisters-Liz and the film crew get drawn more deeply and dangerously into the religious leader's struggles with Christian missionaries, and Alison's hours-long marriage is in ruins when her husband's history overtakes them. VERDICT Laird's intensely layered third novel (Utterly Monkey; Glover's Mistake) beautifully weaves together the threads borne of provocative questions about the possibility of redemption rising from the horrors of war and the courage required to survive the detonation of love.-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
