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| Image courtesy of Washington Post |
A girl grows up in an unstable household, with a controlling single mother and an uncontrollable brother with special needs. Their relationship remains extremely complicated through a series of life events, as well as the introduction of various characters. It's not giving too much away to say that the main character makes some objectively poor choices, almost compulsively, and the way that she deals with them speaks to the depths of the trauma she has lived through.
Told from the point of view of a girl growing up in Ireland, it begins with barely any recognizable speech. In fact, throughout the whole book, the Irish dialect mixed with the idiosyncrasies of the main character rule the page, in such a way that by the end when I was reading it semi-fluently, I still wasn't sure if the writing got clearer as the main character grew up or if I was just getting used to the style of writing. Certainly, the half-formed thing that this girl is also carries through in her manner of thinking and thereby how her thoughts are being expressed on the page.
This is the most Irish thing I have read in a good long while, It has influences of James Joyce stamped all over it. Once I learned to let go and simply try to feel the narrative rather than actively read, it was a better go-around for me. This was an intense experience and I'm not sure I'll be putting myself through it again, but it is the first book in a long time that has stuck out to me so much.
