Customer Reviews

Apologize, Apologize!

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Apologize, Apologize is one of the funniest, sad books, I have ever read. Collie Flanagan is a regular boy born into the most irregular family. His mother literally tells him she does not love him and prefers his younger brother. His younger brother, Bingo, is the handsome, ill-fated never-do-well, who his mother adores, as does he. His father is a broke, pretentious, philanderer who lives off his wife's money. His grandfather, father to his mother, is the wealthiest, most admired and feared man in town and the only one who isn't taken in by Bingo. He loves Collie, but, has an odd way of showing it. I tell you, Ms. Kelly writes with much wit about a family who places the the dys in dsyfunction. There were so many moments when I laughed out loud, felt sad and other times when I wanted to yell at the mean antics of the characters. The one thing I could not do is stop reading. I recommend Apologize, Apologize to all readers, especially those, who can laugh at and appreciate crazy families.

Angelia Menchan
Author of
Schae's Story: A Woman's Transformation

The biggest compliment I can give this book is that I could not put it down! The heartbreaking story of Collie Flanagan's life is a page turner. Around every corner of Collie's life there waits turmoil, humor and at times, child abuse. Ms. Kelly's characters are so perfectly written and she creates every nuance of their personality that you almost feel as if it's a biography rather than fiction. She is adept on so many levels in this book and her prose deserves praise for creating a story that comes to life on the page.

Throughout this novel I kept thinking of John Irving because his influence was apparent. But that is all it is--just an influence. "Apologize,Apologize!" is totally a fresh, unique, quirky tale of dysfunctional families that grabs you from page one and carries you to the end leaving you wishing for more.

I believe Ms. Kelly is off to a great start and if she continues this quality of writing along with imaginative story telling, she will be very successful. It is hard to believe that this is her first novel. I look forward to reading more of her novels in the future.

Apologize, Apologize! is a truly incredible novel. With an original plot and a unique story, this poignant novel pulls you into a world full of contradictions and extremes. The settings for the story are written with care and skill; you can almost hear the waves crashing and nearly smell the crisp, clean air. Collie and his family make up an unforgettable cast of characters whose tumult, emotional clashes are of near-epic proportion. This story has a way of wrapping you in its craziness and dares you to open yourself up to the rich experiences. With clever humour and intelligent dialog, this story (if you let it) will draw you in and hold you with an absorbing sincerity. This Author has a brilliant gift for weaving a story that makes you incredibly happy, then drops you into a murky pool of sadness. Elizabeth Kelly has written a compelling story of a family full of characters who experience jealousy, loss, sorrow, love and unwanted redemption; this novel is a literary masterpiece!
I very highly recommend this book!

(10 out of 10 Diamonds) - Absolutely LOVED it!!


© 2008-2009 Bobbie Crawford-McCoy (Book Reviews By Bobbie).
All rights reserved.

My family has a house on Martha's Vineyard only a mile or so from the Flanagan house in the novel--so I'm familiar with the location. But the novel is really about off-islanders (anyone not born on the Vineyard is a classic off-islander, but with more and more off-islanders living there year-round, the term can now mean more of a summer resident, someone with minimal involvement in the island itself). The Flanagans are the far-left-wing mother, whose rich father lives outside Boston, her husband and his brother, and the two sons Collie and Bingo. It's not a happy mix at all. The husband plays around, the mother is basically a nut case, the uncle is an Irish-American nebbish--if I can string those words together. Reviewers call the family dysfunctional, which it is--but on the Vineyard it's nothing much out of the ordinary--I've seen much worse there, including an off-island family in which the father advocated that the federal government buy machine guns for all the blacks in Washington DC so they could protect themselves from the fascist police and who liked to pose as his daughter's boyfriend. The Flanagans wouldn't arouse much comment.

The first part of the novel is about Collie's youth and his eccentric family, the second third is about college days at Brown and tragedy, and the final third wanders here and there to El Salvador, etc, with further tragedy. The second and third parts really do not work successfully. What the author should have done is to stick with just the first part and expanded it. The eccentricity, the bewilderment, dealing with difficult parents--there's plenty of room for development. Consider, for example, Irving's The World According to Garp: lots of eccentricity, enjoyable to read, creative--it also made a fine movie. So if the novel had stuck with Collie from, say, 7 to 17, presenting him as a rock of sanity in a sea of lunacy, and showing how he learned to deal with family foibles--that would have worked very well. I suspect that the first third is what will stick in readers' minds long after they've forgotten the other parts.

As I noted, the Flanagans, though living on the Vineyard year-round, are really off-islanders. There's no sense of involvement with the community in the novel, it's all insiders without any outsiders--people outside the family. Why is the family living year-round on the Vineyard? What does the father do? (maybe it was said, but I cannot recall anything). There are details that aren't right (not a problem unless you know the location). There are no places to dock a sailboat on the Squibnocket Beach (or anywhere on the ocean side of the Vineyard). The second part of the novel has a significant episode involving caving, but the closest cave that might match the story would be 250-300 miles away in NY State, and there are other major problems with the episode as well. There are some other works you might want to look at. The movie Losing Chase with Helen Mirren is partly filmed in the same locale as the novel. Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons is well worth reading, also set in Chilmark, and provides a good sense of the community in the off-season. So--overall--this has plenty of potential, but it needs focus and a sense of direction. The cover shows two boys dashing off to the beach with some of the western Squibnocket-like cliffs in the background--this is where the book should be concentrated.

This book is a the best kind of a read. You will think about ALL the main characters and wish some of your own family had just a touch of the madness in these pages. Wonderful dogs, a mother that bites with language, a cooking, crazy uncle, drinking dad, and a famous grandfather try raising two boys. Dark moments, yes, but relationships and conversations to be treasured.

Seriously, I love the snarky, hilarious dialogue, the mean characters, but the story loses its steam halfway through. And those metaphors, nearly ever paragraph ends with one so clever it draws focus from Collie, Bingo, and my favorite, Uncle Tom. Ultimately disappointing

Ever so often we stumble on a book that leaves us with that feeling that we don't want the story to end. This is definitely one of those books! I thought this book was the best one I've read in long time. Collie Flanagan has a quirky, crazy, sometimes charming and definitely bizarre family. As he grows up in this family and he suffers some setbacks and some tragedies, his family doesn't change with him. They remain the same quirky, crazy people and he soon realizes that their support doesn't give him the answers he is seeking. Collie branches out in directions that he feels will help him cope, only to return to his family with none of his issues resolved. The family becomes the distraction he needs to get his life back on track. You will love this book!

I seldom fail to finish a book, but this one finally got to me. The phenomenon of reviewers who examine wildly dysfunctional, ghastly people in novels/movies/TV shows, and declare the miserable circumstances in which the miserable characters wallow in circumstances utterly without redeeming social value and then declare them to be funny, rollicking, humorous, or any other positive permutation of humorous strike me as being themselves deeply disturbed. A mother who hates one of her children and doesn't hesitate to tell him so at every opportunity, while gushing sentiments perilously close to incest to her other son is not funny. A drunken sot of a father whose sole purpose within the family appears to be disgusting all and sundry, an uncle whose role is to go the father one better, but who at least feeds the kid at times, and an icy, remote grandfather who is only marginally aware of the boy are not funny. Wealth protects people like this, but does nothing tojustify their existence. As a therapist I have treated people unfortunate enough to have been raised in such twisted families, and money has only meant the parents could buy their way out of either their own sins, or the resultant activities of their offspring. No one escapes the pain and damage to the psyches, and no one escapes some sort of dysfunction in later life. None of it is funny. No one is happy. Writing books purporting to be funny when dealing with subject matter of this sort tends to fail, miserably. There are some gifted writers who can imbue their stories with a certain mad humor, this writer is not one of them. This book is not the result of such a rare gift. This book is larded with characters of such monumental self-absorption that any twinge of empathy or sympathy I might otherwise have nurtured within my breast died aborning.

Collie Flanagan was born on the day JFK was assassinated. His family is insanely rich and somewhat eccentric. Collie's mother, Anais, is very open about the fact that his brother, Bingo, is her favorite. As a matter of fact, it seems like everyone in the family favors Bingo, except Anais's father, who was in Collie's corner. Anais loathes her father (who Collie refers to as the Falcon) but tries not to antagonize him too much because he's the one who controls the purse strings.

Collie is a serious, studious young man. Most of his family can't understand why he works so hard and why he wants to get a job. Bingo is happy-go-lucky - everyone loves him and he loves everyone - but he is full of mischief and gets kicked out of one school after another. At times, it seems Bingo is the thorn in Collie's side.

Even though his family is full of quirky characters, life seems to be moving along fine for Collie - he graduated from Andover and is now attending Brown. One day his family is struck by two terrible tragedies that change the course of Collie's life forever.

I enjoyed the quirky characters and the unusual family dynamics in Elizabeth Kelly's book, Apologize, Apologize! At times the characters seemed "way out there," yet they were still believable. I felt so much for Collie - he worked so hard and achieved so much, but seemed to be lost in this family of larger than life characters. Collie says,

"Those fantastic Flanagans, they exist just outside the door leading to me. Technicolor characters in what seems like a separate cartoon-strip version of my life. Plain as a line drawing by comparison, I was the domestic equivalent of a moderate voice in a divided Ireland."

This story is told from Collie's viewpoint and the writing is wonderful - descriptive and conversational. I was drawn into Collie's story and found myself thinking of it whenever I wasn't able to read. My only complaint with the book is that I would have liked a less ambiguous ending.

The four adults in this book angered me because they are so self indulgent in their own pathos that Collie and Bing never had a chance. Maybe Uncle Tom brings some redemption to himself in the last couple chapters but only maybe. At least Falcon funds the whole escapade. The characters are very stereotypical in their behaviors and actions. Even Collie is the "poor little rich boy" who gets into every type of trouble possible on an international scale. And although there are a few poignant lines in the book, such as when Collies says,"... I wasn't going to want her to love me anymore.", I found the author ready just to close down a segment and transition to another with simple dismissive statements and transitional phrases. As the fly leaf says, this book "takes us into the perversely charmed world" but I would change the word charmed to schizophrenic and the chaos is not an "exhilaratingly constant" but a near death experience.