Redheaded Reviews: Crosstalk by Connie Willis

Crosstalk is the "disturbance in a communication device's (radio, telephone, etc.) transmission caused by a second device's transmission, resulting in crossover, intermingling, and confusion". Briddey Finnegan works at Commspan a cellphone company that is in competition with Apple. She is dating Trent Worth who wants to have an EED done which is a brain surgery that connects the couple emotionally and allows them to feel what the other person feels. It's like a step before asking her to marry him which she is anxious to allow happen as he is perfect and they could get an apartment with a doorman that blocks out her family that keeps barging in on her life.

First, there's her great aunt Oona who talks with a fake Irish accent and belongs to the Daughters of Ireland and is hoping to find a "fine Irish lad" for her nieces. Then there's her sister Kathleen who dates losers and is always asking her opinion on her boyfriends. Then there's her sister Mary Kate who is overly worried about her nine-year-old daughter Maeve and believes that she is up to something when she is not. Then there's Maeve who is an expert in electronics and is exasperated by her mother.

Her family is against her getting the EED and so is C.B. Swartz the man at her job who creates the apps for the new phone. C.B. is an oddball who lives in the basement where there is no cellular service and doesn't own a cell phone. But Trent manages to get them in to see the top doctor who does EED's early and she tells no one that she is having one done. Once she has it done she calls out to Trent afterward and in her mind C.B. answers telepathically. It takes a while for her to believe that he didn't bug her room and that she is actually talking to him telepathically.

C.B. tells her that those with the pure Irish genes have the possibility of being telepathic. But C.B. is keeping something from her. And when she begins to hear more than his voice she freaks out because she can't keep the tidal wave of voices from overwhelming her and he rescues her. Soon Briddey finds herself falling for C.B. but wonders if he feels the same way. And then when she hears from Trent telepathically things really get complicated.

This is a wonderful book that you want to never end and it is very long so you almost get your wish. The characters are both loveable and hateable. And the quotes at the beginning of each chapter is perfect. This is an amazing book with a creative spin to it and I give it five out of five stars.

Quotes

It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

-Jerome K. Jerome (The Liars’ Club)

But seemingly a lad with a kind heart isn’t good enough for her. It’s ‘compatiable’ he’s got to be. Compatible! ‘Kathleen’ I said to her, ‘if there aren’t times when you’re wantin’ to break his head in, then ‘tis not love you’re in, ‘tis only a romantic dream.’ You lasses shouldn’t be wantin’ a man who’s ‘compatible’, but one who’ll be there when you need him.

-Connie Willis (Crosstalk p 140)

Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk.

-Eoin Colfer (Artemis Foul)

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

-Antoine de Saint Exupery (The Little Prince)

Three o’clock’s when every doubt and regret and guilty thought bubbles up out of your subconscious to plague you. “The dark night of the soul,” F. Scott Fitgerald called it.

-Connie Willis (Crosstalk p 348)

There’s nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse.

-Irish Proverb

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

-Anotony Trollope (The Bertrams)

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

-Daniel Parick Moynihan