Disappointing. I really enjoyed Let the Great World Spin but I just couldn't get interested in TransAtlantic. The story dragged for me. ( )

Stitching realistic fiction to historic fact McCann creates a vibrant narrative of intimate beauty. Like many of the characters, my father traveled from Northern Ireland to Canada, so their stories touch my own. But the universal qualities of surprise connection, stumbling through life in survival mode, striving for freedom, or shaping it from shreds of loss and betrayal invite any reader into the saga.

My heart pounded as if in the open cockpit in an early description of flight. Mid-way through my attention flagged but I re-engaged as the narrative loop swung round and I began to see the intersection of stories. Along with the sensuous (full of the senses) fabric of the work, it is the small cast of ordinary (but extraordinary) women, all related, that made this such a satisfying read. ( )

This was not a poorly written book by any means, it was just boring as hell.
( )

If you're looking for a light read or a happy ending, turn back! This is most definitely an Irish book, which means you need to prepare yourself in advance for perverse twists of fate, bleak humor, and tragedy. So why do I keep reading Irish books? Because Irish authors tend to be brilliant storytellers, creating vivid tales full of heartbreaking humanity and lyric beauty. I wish I could say that that's what happened here, but I can't.

I simply couldn't find any emotional resonance in the story arcs of the characters in this novel. Perhaps because of the story's scope and episodic nature, readers aren't given a lot of time to get to know each of the characters before we're whisked away to another time, another country, another generation. (To be clear, McCann gives us plenty of backstory; just not a lot of emotional depth to go with it.) Horrible things happen to each character that I know *should* have evoked sympathy (trigger warning: the children in this tale are particularly prone to ghastly ends), but mostly they just evoked horror because I never felt like these events were happening to real people. (With one exception: there's this bit with a woman and a baby on a road that will haunt me for a while.) Which is ironic, because at least two of the characters in this novel - Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, and Senator George Mitchell, the politician who helped bring to an end Ireland's ghastly Troubles - are, of course, actual historic personages. But 300 pages later, I can't say I feel like this tale deepened my understanding of either.

Which is not to say that this book lacks literary merit - especially McCann's affecting exploration the nature of slavery in all its manifestations: literal slavery (Frederick Douglass), political slavery (Ireland under English rule), social slavery (England's class system), economic slavery (the desperate plight of Irish peasants), cultural oppression, gender oppression, even the emotional slavery of grief. Some of the most memorable moments in the tale are when Frederick Douglass, touring through Ireland to raise support for the abolitionist cause, comes to realize just how many forms of slavery and oppression there are in this world.

I've read a number of reviews talking about how the vignettes in this novel are bound together by generations of Irish women, but I'd argue the real glue that binds this together is the eponymous transatlantic journey that McCann recounts in the first chapter. Because, in the end, I feel like this novel is very much about the lessons that the pilots learn in the course of their perilous passage from Newfoundland to Ireland: that sometimes in life you're going to have to navigate by dead reckoning; that the only way to survive a spin is to maintain speed and ride it out; and that sometimes winning is about enduring adversity rather than triumphing over it. Valid life lessons to be sure, but in this instance, not enough to capture my empathy or imagination. ( )

Reading this book was like riding a roller coaster of emotions. Prior to claiming it off the library hold list I was excited about tackling it, having read some very positive reviews. As I started reading it, my excitement diminished page by page as I struggled to understand why the story jumped around in time and place, from Newfoundland in the years after World War I to Ireland in the 1840s to Missouri in the late 19th century. Each stop seemed completely unrelated to the one that came before, and the one that followed. I began to wonder how on earth this disjointed mess had earned such lavish praise.

Then, finally, I realized that what had seemed to be completely unrelated chapters were actually tied together through the family lines of one woman, Lily Duggan, who is a maid in a fancy Dublin home when former slave Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland to encourage the Irish to support the American abolition movement. Each chapter had somewhere at its heart a descendant of Lily, from the Civil War mother who helps her husband run an ice-cutting empire in the American Midwest to the journalist who chronicles one of the first transatlantic flights to the woman who loses everything in contemporary Ireland.

Once I found the common thread, my interest and appreciation for the book picked up. I enjoyed most the chapters devoted to Douglass' sojourn in Ireland and a visit more than a century later by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, trying desperately to bring together Catholics and Protestants to form a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. None of the stories end in triumph; the most we can hope for, McCann implies, is a sense of quiet satisfaction and no expectation of glory. Many of the characters do not even achieve that minor grace, and my heart ached for some of their stories and lives.

Although by the end I was appreciating McCann's cleverness and deft interweaving of timelines and placelines, I just can't give this book my highest recommendation. I don't need or want to be hit over the head with an anvil by an author trying to convey the themes he will explore, but to read roughly a third of a book without having any idea where it's going seemed a shade too opaque for any but the most dedicated English major used to parsing meaning from prose. ( )