Product Description

As a teenager in the late '70s, Pen O'Grady fell in love with Cara Wall. Although Cara was always engaged in unrequited love for other people, their unconventional relationship survived until their late twenties, when Cara died in a car accident. Pen's narration covers the week of the funeral and fourteen years of baffling memories. A bittersweet, sexy tale about romance and loss.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #658135 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"I'm blithering, amn't I?" asks Pen O'Grady, narrator of Donoghue's second novel (after Stir-Fry). Many readers will answer "yes"?and that's a shame, because behind Pen's banal chattiness lies an agreeable and affecting story. Thirty-year-old Dublin schoolteacher Pen has just lost her lover of 13 years, Cara Wall, in a car crash. Though mapping the trajectory of Pen's grief seems Donoghue's primary aim, she also explores issues untouched by death: Will Pen bed Cara's sexy older sister, Kate, who's flown home from America for the funeral? Will Pen find the courage to come out to her mother and to Cara's father? Quotidian tails of housecleaning and coffee-brewing share space, sometimes too much, with tender and troubling flashbacks of life with the flame-haired, faithless Cara, whom Pen first seduced on their convent-school roof. Donoghue's unsentimental examination of the complex relationship between the two women is a pleasure, but the story line, lacking dramatic tension, ultimately sags under the weight of Pen's wordiness. U.K., translation, dramatic rights: Caroline Davidson, London.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hood is a tale of love between two Catholic women in Dublin, Ireland--a country in which homosexuality still largely dares not speak its name openly. Cara's sudden death at 30 leaves bereaved Penelope shocked, grieving, reliving their 14-year relationship, which Donoghue covers in a series of overlapping flashbacks, from the time the two met in convent school in the late seventies to the early nineties, when they lived together in Cara's father's home. Funeral preparations and postburial returns to "normalcy" alternate with Pen's recollections of the moody, tempestuous Cara. These memories include screamingly good sex muffled from Cara's father's ears; Cara's repeated forays into other women's and men's beds; day-to-day routines the two shared, including Cara's maddening habit of asking life's larger questions as they drift to sleep at night; and, most important, Pen's development into a coping but vulnerable adult. Although some may find it slow, others will consider this love story that well conveys the complexities and nuances of intimate relationships stately and elegiac. Whitney Scott

From Kirkus Reviews
This second novel by Donoghue (Stir-fry, 1994) offers an elegiac reconstruction of a long love affair and a fascinating portrait of lesbian society in modern Ireland. Bright, self-assured, dependable Pen O'Grady first meets neurotic, alluring, exasperating Cara while both are in convent school. The two quickly become fast friends and, more gradually, lovers. Donoghue offers a wry, sharply observed portrait of the manner in which the adolescent Pen and Cara come to terms with their sexuality, the mingled fear and exuberance of their discovery, the conflicting pressures to hide and proclaim their love. Their physical passion (``a blur of bliss across the brain'') turns out to be the simplest part of the relationship. Cara, restless, romantic, scornful of the more mundane elements of life (Living, Pen says, ``seemed to be more of a battle for Cara than anyone I knew'') seems driven to wander: She repeatedly breaks off the affair, pursues (sometimes disastrously) other women, yet always eventually returns to the tart but forgiving Pen. She is returning yet again, after a brief fling, when she dies in an accident. The novel is essentially a monologue as, from the perspective of the week in which her lover is buried, Pen, alternately angry or despairing, looks back over their 14-year relationship, reconstructing it, attempting to make some sense of their lives together. Pen ruefully admits that she has always been ``solid,'' dependable, even predictable. But Donoghue does a deft job of catching Pen's wry intelligence and intense romanticism, the deep certainty she has in her identity. She is less successful with Cara, who remains a somewhat enigmatic figure: It's uncertain whether Cara is merely intensely self-absorbed or a generous, tormented figure. Fortunately, though, it's Pen who dominates this spare, powerful narrative. Her unsparing record of a difficult, intense, vital affair, and her meditations on the nature of desire, are exact and profoundly moving. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Uncommon
Whenever I encounter a novel with homosexual themes, I usually roll my eyes. You can predict what's going to happen most of the time: the two fall in love, they disagree about coming out/ one gets beat up/ they have to hide/ etc., they are pulled apart, then they come back together against all odds and love overcomes all.

All except death. This novel is great because, for the most part, this is not the plot. Cara's death has nothing to do with her sexuality, and besides having to explain her relation to Cara, Pen's grieving is the grieving of anyone who has lost someone close. This is not about lesbians (although they are the main characters); it's about love and grief and living through that grief, no matter what sexual orientation you are.

I definitely reccomend it.

Beyond coming-out...
Absorbing and intense, this novel goes far beyond typical "coming-out" literature. Set in Dublin in the 80's, Hood follows the main character Pen (thirties, a teacher) through the week following her lover's death. Jealousy, intimacy, passion, shame and even humor: it's all here as we experience the grieving process with an invisible widow. Grief is not a quick phase and so the book may at times feel weighty and a little slow-moving. But stick with it -- and you won't have to make yourself do that for long -- for Emma Donoghue's delicate and deft prose will pull you back in. You may even find yourself as I did: coming back to read Hood again and again. In the end, this is a book about indentity and finding hope -- not in spite of, but through, one's pain.

Have emotions, or want to develop some?
Penelope and Cara, the protagonists of this novel, share many attributes. They are both lesbians, feminists, dubliners, schoolmates, friends, and lovers. There are two very enormous differences between them though and it's these differences, sprinkled between the similarities, that make this novel ring so true and devastating and joyous: one (pen)is loyal and cara is not. And pen is alive, while cara has just died in one of those "who would've thought " car accidents that seem to strike with terrifying random and frequency.
While lesbianism and it's resulting feminism in 80's Ireland are certainly vibrant issues in this book, Donoghue imparts each character with such stunning humanity that anyone with a heart and a lover will recognize their struggles and their tragedies, not to mention their triumphs. And though the sex scenes are honest and intense, they don't read like a guidebook-they are filled with passion. And that passion is both heightened and irrevocably intensified, because the reader meets these two after one of them has left the living.
Donoghue also paints the five different stages of grief with a deft, empathetic hand, weaving between past and present and never staying on either too long, she introduces the reader to Cara by inches, while taking her away from Pen by degrees. Pen's struggle to get through her daily life while wrestling with the more esoteric demands of bereavement will be recognized by anyone who has experienced a sudden loss. And though Donoghue never lets the reader or Pen judge Cara too harshly, she let's cara be a three dimentional being, even in death, i.e. she never let's her be a saint or a ghost.
By the end of the book, which takes up one week in real life, the reader is in love with them both and probably feels a strong urge to go find their lover and squeeze them tightly, even though they've neglected to be perfect. Like many masterpieces, and I don't use that word lightly, this book covers all emotions without making the reader feel she is being manipulated or left behind. I've read this book several times and never tire of it, though every time through I do sniffle a bit. Okay, I sob. But even while crying, I feel the immediacy and wonder of life and it's not every book (or writer) that can do all those things at once and still make you laugh outright in the bargain.