Orchid Child

2.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary Kate is a neuroscientist who unexpectedly found herself the guardian and foster mother of her troubled nephew Teague. In the wake of a scandal that saw her resign from her laboratory (and romantic partner) under a cloud, she's come to Ireland, home of her grandmother to find a new life. But the voices that Teague hears, and the things he sees, get tied in a complex knot with their family history and Ireland's past struggles.Review I felt some trepidation almost immediately on starting this book – which opens with an American going to Ireland and considering her Irish roots. And the book does have a certain amount of the fawning compliments to Ireland I was afraid of – the grass is greener, the people happier and more open, etc. The other strand of the book explores mental health, weaving in a (fairly thin) speculative strand about the fae, as well as a (similarly thin) love story.The intent is good, and the mental health elements solid (so far as I can tell). It's the overall editing of the book that lets it down. Not only are there far more typographical, semantic, and and formatting errors than there should be for a released book, there are aspects that just make it quite hard to follow and to care about the characters.As an example, early on, the story introduces mention of ‘Maureen'. There's a little context, but I wasn't at all confident of who Maureen was for another several chapters, at least. The family tree is crucial to this story and yet I not only wasn't too sure who was who, I quickly lost interest. When there's a big reveal at the end, I really didn't care.Despite the story being largely about personal interactions and relationships, I felt those aspects were fairly weak. When a character is revealed as having committed heinous acts, the acts themselves are quickly set aside. The context is Ireland's struggles for independence, and the story quickly takes a definite side, with the British as brutal occupiers and the IRA as brave patriots. That would be fine if the story weren't pretending to be more objective. Present criminal consequences for past actions are largely ignored, though Ireland and the US have an extradition agreement.The speculative elements feature fairly early, but then fade away as the story moves on to its ancestry elements. I felt the whole faerie piece was largely abandoned, if not quite forgotten. Or rather, this serious scientist quickly accepts second sight without much question and stops thinking about it. She's also an atheist who appears all too ready to grab on to religion.The protagonist I found a little hard to swallow. She's coming out of a disastrous, poorly considered relationship with what seems to be the first man interested in her, and (no spoiler, this is pretty clearly signposted), eventually and with no consideration falls for the second man to be interested in her. Just why he is is never really clear, other than that there's a romance in the novel, and he's the love interest. There are other aspects of the ending that are wrapped up in other, similarly unconvincing ways.In addition to the poor proofreading, Costello often uses tenses that, while usually not technically incorrect, read awkwardly. She uses past and present tense to distinguish between two timeframes, but the tenses often introduce brief uncertainty about which we're in. I had the feeling that the piece was originally written with other tenses and not entirely retrofitted. I found it extremely distracting.All in all, an interesting effort with some good elements that to me were overshadowed by incomplete editing and overconvenient wrapups.