The Bottom Line: A bold, darkly funny alien contact thriller where catastrophe is only the beginning and escape may be impossible.
Hard Worked Days begins as Fares Khalil, a Lebanese immigrant and Brooklyn building superintendent, tries to fix a tenant’s toilet. Meanwhile across the neighborhood, Ionna Sari is working at Monica’s Bakery, juggling impatient customers, burnt cookies and the kind of ordinary exhaustion that comes from needing the job more than liking it.
Author Lawrence P. O’Brien then tears that world apart. What at first appears to be a meteorite streaks across the sky, destroying Manhattan. Fares and Ionna, saved by distance and Brooklyn’s unique topography, survive the blast. Drawn with other stunned survivors toward Prospect Park in Brooklyn, they gather near open ground and tree cover, where an egg-like object glides into the park, hatches and releases a crablike creature that sprays Fares and Ionna before disintegrating. Afterward, both find the same mysterious word – tribute – repeating in their minds
When Fares tries to flee Brooklyn by heading toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the streets themselves seem to turn him back. Ionna’s own attempts confirm the pattern. An invisible barrier is closing in on them, not merely trapping them in the city but steering them toward the crater where Manhattan used to be. Together, they resolve to find a way out.
Compared with O’Brien’s earlier books Swallowing the Muskellunge and Clochán, Hard Worked Days is an obvious genre departure. What remains consistent is O’Brien’s talent for telling moving stories about perilous journeys and ordinary lives suddenly forced into contact with larger, more dangerous forces. It’s easy to imagine O’Brien exploring still other genres using the same deep fascination with people forced into the unknown.
In addition to his medical knowledge, Fares’s wary humor exudes resilience. Ionna, a Greek immigrant carrying deep personal grief, can match him with sarcasm and stubbornness. Their reluctant partnership, edged at first with suspicion and irritation before it becomes romantic, gives the novel its emotional center.
The book’s setting is as much a character as its supporting cast. O’Brien depicts Brooklyn through the texture of people trying to keep a wounded neighborhood functioning. Tenants still complain, bakery customers still demand sandwiches, broken windows need covering. Although the novel eventually moves far beyond Monica’s Bakery, the place remains important as the story’s first image of community. It stands for the everyday world that catastrophe interrupts. People earn their living there and look after one another there, even when fear and irritation make kindness difficult.Hard Worked Days expands toward a question of planetary consequence, with some truly wild scenes that are guaranteed to surprise. While the book delivers real stakes worthy of any action thriller audience, its real strength lies in the bond between two damaged people who are forced to confront the unknown together.
