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Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel Of Ireland (2010)

by Frank Delaney(Favorite Author)

3.57 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1400067839 (ISBN13: 9781400067831)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Random House

review 1: There brilliant glimpses of the magic of storytelling that Delaney wrote about in his book "Ireland." Only glimpses, though. And filling up the rest of the story were meandering digressions and uninteresting anecdotes. There was altogether too much transition phrases like, "what happened next would change me forever" in an annoy sort of way. I was always waiting to feel the change or feel the love, but instead he just told us it was there.
review 2: Frank Delaney is, true to his Irish heritage, a great story teller so it’s appropriate that the omniscient narrator of this novel makes it clear from the outset that he’s about to tell us one helluva good story. He’s also prone to digress (something he warns us about from the very beginning) and so during the... more course of this amazing tale that centers around events that took place in 1932 when Ireland’s political situation was far from stable we are constantly being pulled away from the action of the novel in order to listen to stories from mythology, folklore and history. And that was especially entertaining since I was listening to the audio version of this book, narrated by Delaney himself. The plot itself took a while to unfold and I had trouble sticking with it at first until the many different colorful characters became more familiar. To add to the confusion, the novel moves back and forth through time since the narrator is a middle-aged man retelling the fantastic story of how he and his father fell under the spell of the alluring and unconventional Venetia Kelly and her troupe of equally eccentric travelling performers. Most of them are a delightfully strange bunch but part of the novel’s appeal has to do with the sense that things aren’t quite as charming as they appear to be. There’s a mystery in the air and it has to do with Venetia’s beautiful mother who we are uneasy about from the start, and with her thoroughly despicable and sleazy father. There’s definitely something fishy going on and as the novel progresses it gets harder and harder to keep from reading ahead. But since I was listening, rather than reading, I had no choice but put up with my curiosity and wait impatiently for Ben the narrator to get on with the story. less

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