Pennermag.com

For more than twenty years, Maeve Binchy has been an auto-read for me. (And I think I’ve even shelled out for a hardcover or two). I loved her earlier books filled with tales of small Irish towns, petty, and not so petty grievances, and wonderfully complicated relationships.

In 1996, however, with the book, Evening Class, I felt Ms. Binchy had made a left turn in her writing. Instead of writing novels, it seemed her books were more like short story collections. And with Whitethorn Woods, and this book Heart and Soul, I feel that Binchy is really giving us more a book of vignettes than a fully developed novel.

In Heart and Soul we meet a few new characters who come together to create and staff and cardiac rehabilitation clinic. And the new characters were touching, Ania and her tragic background from Poland, and Clara Casey and her family. However, I felt this book spent far too much time trying to tie up loose ends from past books including Evening Class and Whitethorn Woods. Unfortunately, unlike Binchy, I have not kept this grand running list of characters in my head. Instead, the reintroduction of Nora O’Donahue, Cathy Scarlet, Brenda Brennan, and the twins Simon and Maud niggled the brain.

I couldn’t relax and let the story unfold.  Instead,  I kept shaking my head trying to remember these characters’ backstory and consider whether it was relevant to what was going on in the present tale. For true Binchy fans with an encyclopedic knowledge of her past work, it will be nice to have a visit. For the rest of us, where hundreds of books may have passed between her last and this latest . . . it will be a bumpy ride down memory lane, albeit with a satisfying ending.