Mr. Flood's Last Resort: A Novel
By: Jess Kidd / Narrated By: Aoife McMahon
Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
Luminous writing, memorable characters—a strange and sometimes bumpy joy of a ride!
So sue me—this time I did NOT reeeally look at all of the Publishers Summary; I only saw 1) Irish author! and 2) Woman Irish author!
Plus the first bit about a crotchety old guy, a Gothic old homesteading hoarder’s house, and a young woman caretaker who has pluck and spunkiness galore. I thought I was in for some light chick-lit (I KNOW—Seriously: Sue me!).
What I got instead was not a light jaunt into a quirky and lovingly evolving relationship but a sometimes dark trip into lies, secrets, twists and turns, characters with hidden motives. But ALSO—really warm and loving friendships, painful pasts, and a good healthy dose of magic… which might also be insanity.
Maud is only the newest of caretakers hired on by an agency as old Cathal Flood’s last chance to stay in his home. He’s driven off several caretakers, sent some into madness even, and if Maud doesn’t work out: He’s off to a nursing home where his much-loved independence will all go by the wayside. Maud is shrewd, sensitive, and takes things one step at a time, going so far as to name each of the man’s many, many almost feral cats after writers. She picks her battles, winnowing hoarded mounds into small spaces where she can work, where Cathal can live (She even sets up a little habitat to lure him into nesting: A chair, a table, Sudoku, and good sunlight, all as tho’ he’s a wary and jittery animal, looking for a place to just be).
Maud is saucy, yes, willing to meet his crude and vulgar conversation with spicy rejoinders and the oft-used, “ye old fecker…!” right back at him. But mostly she sees, that behind his accusations as situations unfold, there are tears in the man’s eyes, and that no matter how foul his language, he’s really just an old man crying, and that’s enough to make her totally cut the man some slack.
With the goading of her dear friend Renata, a theatrically transgender woman living in the stage costumes from her days as a magician’s assistant, Maud is drawn into the mystery of Mr. Flood’s wife, Mary’s, sudden death by falling, of his missing daughter, of another young girl who went missing. And what the two, soon to be three (The entrance of Sam, a former caretaker of Mr. Flood) start coming up with does not bode well for Mr. Flood. Maud, driven by ghostly apparitions and communications with the dead, soon starts seeing Cathal’s unsavory past, and starts seeing his current behavior as evasive, maybe even obstructive.
So there’s a mystery, and y’all know I’m a dolt when it comes to those, happy to let things play themselves out without trying to figure out the Whodunnit as I listen along. But this time, I was charmed by some really terrific writing, some surprising plot and character twists, into making assumptions and deductions, all of which proved to be vastly off the mark. In short, I was lured into participating in the story, in the mystery.
And make no mistake: author Jess Kidd fearlessly threw in twist after twist, ulterior motive after ulterior motive, with a joyous and beautifully written abandon. And she wasn’t afraid to go dark (As some other reviewers were turned off by). There’s an instant when one of Maud’s old Catholic saints (Which only she can see) makes the decision to show Maud what’s reeeally going on in a confusing situation, and it’s an eerie moment when we see plastic sheeting in the trunk of the car… NOTHING good ever came from someone carting around plastic sheeting, right?
This was my first experience with narrator Aoife McMahon, and to say I was delighted with her performance would be a massive understatement. This book is chockfull of crazy characters from murderers to saints, from heartthrob males to the horny Maud, from the curmudgeonly and profane Mr. Flood to the effusive and agonized Renata, and she carries each character, each situation with ease, grace, and personality galore. That she mastered the ominous tones to go with the lighter and nudge-nudge-wink-wink? Truly, what a wonder!
If you can stick with the rather confusing first bit of the book (There are no holds barred by Kidd as she throws the reader/listener plenty of punches as far as multi-faceted characters and plot setup go), you’re in for a wonderful ride. Gorgeous writing, much emotion, and even as Maud goes way off course and makes mistakes, you’re firmly in her corner.
And me? Maaaybe I’m looking at Mysteries as a genre with a great deal of promise for enjoyment!
I CAN learn! Whoulda thunk it?!?
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