Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 6

Out this month!

Autonomy is an anthology edited by poet and pro-choice activist Kathy D’Arcy, with all proceeds going towards abortion rights campaigns both in Ireland and abroad (quick note re the latter, in case you were wondering: sales outside of Ireland can’t be used to fund referendum campaigns).

I’m really delighted to have a short story in here, and there’s so many other great pieces included – a lot of poetry that will make you enraged at this country, thought-provoking stories, real-life accounts, and speeches and essays about the state of bodily autonomy in Ireland (or lack thereof).

The Dublin launch is tomorrow night, 6pm at Books Upstairs, and all are welcome. You can also support Together For Yes directly, which over 11,000 of us have done the past few days (I have hope that this thing will actually pass, folks).

Other launch dates for the diary: UCC (April 19th, 5pm), UCD (April 26th, 5.30pm), UL (April 20th, time TBC) for the colleges; also Kilkenny (The Book Centre, April 27th, 5pm), Galway (The Black Gate, May 5th, 6.30pm), Belfast (Book Festival, June 8th, 6pm), London (Etcetera Theatre, April 7th, 7.30pm) and Sydney (venue TBC, May 1st, 7pm)

Meanwhile…

Issue #6 of Banshee is now available to order and also out in the world. We had our Dublin launch last night in the Winding Stair bookshop on Ormond Quay, a treasure-trove for booklovers and a place that’s always very supportive of literary journals.

The Cork launch takes place tonight in Waterstones at 7pm, and we’re already putting together #7 (it never ends!). You can subscribe to Banshee here, if so inclined… two issues a year, arriving on your doorstep before they’re officially launched.

Other things: on May 10th there’s an art pop-up in aid of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, and on April 26th Reading The Future will be launched in Hodges Figgis – both worth checking out!

Bookish Thoughts: March

Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I yap about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were, whether they came out years ago or last week.

From the archives:

I’ve been rereading Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland , which is one of her very best – a completely believable and sympathetic account of how easy it is to get caught up with the wrong kind of guy.


This month’s shiny new reads:

YA fiction reviewed this month in the Irish Times includes Anna Carey’s Mollie on the March , Laura Steven’s The Exact Opposite of Okay , Laura Dockrill’s Big Bones , Brigid Kemmerer’s More Than We Can Tell , Peadar O’Guilin’s The Invasion and Matt Killeen’s Orphan Monster Spy (all terrific reads).
Laurie Halse Anderson & Emily Carroll have adapted Anderson’s seminal YA novel Speak into a graphic novel, and it’s absolutely stunning. The slight modernisations are welcome, and the artwork – particularly when it comes to showing us Melinda’s own art – is a treat.
I gobbled up The Woman In The Window by AJ Finn, a psychological thriller that sometimes gets a bit too self-conscious in its references to the black-and-white movies it draws inspiration of, but that nevertheless kept me eagerly turning the pages. A trained therapist who should know better than to mix her medications with alcohol (but this is a psychological thriller and we must raise questions about the reliability of our female protagonists!), Anna Fox is now trapped in her house due to agoraphobia. Her world has shrunk to what she can see from her window and the rare visitor, so naturally no one believes her when she’s convinced a murder has taken place…

And then I read Laura Lippman’s new novel, Sunburn , which is one of those books you want to savour. An homage to her fellow Maryland writers, Anne Tyler and James M Cain, and peppered with so many gorgeous, cool, noir-y lines (“Being a good sport sounds like such a good thing, but there’s no good thing that can’t become bad for you”) you just want to quote (“Amazing women often remain single into their thirties” is another one, though for different reasons), it’s an absolute joy to read. Polly is the mysterious woman who’s just left her family, and Adam is the private investigator hired to figure things out – and to trace down the money she apparently has. Part mystery, part love story, it’s poised and confident and more than a little sad. A sharp, polished gem of a book.



To watch out for:

Her Name Was Rose , which is out at the end of June- a new departure for women’s fiction author Claire Allan. When Emily witnesses the death of a woman right in front of her, she’s convinced it’s no accident – convinced, indeed that the speeding car was meant for her. Guiltily, and with something haunting her she’s not quite willing to share with us just yet, she begins to look into Rose’s life, finding out what she can from social media about Rose’s life, career, family, and husband. As Emily begins to take Rose’s place – at work and by slowly befriending the grieving husband, helping out with their small child – we find ourselves wondering just how ‘perfect’ Rose’s life was after all. This is fast-paced and compulsive, drawing on the skilful characterisation and dialogue that are hallmarks of women’s fiction and throwing in a lot more darkness. I read this in a day, finding so much about it pleasing – the Derry setting, the insights into journalism (Allan is a former reporter), the use of social media (without ever wagging a finger and going ‘see why this is bad for you’, thankfully), the Brooding Author figure, and some twists that I honestly didn’t see coming but that didn’t feel contrived either. One to watch out for this summer.

Bold Girls!

Most of the Bold Girls on the steps of The Long Room, Old Library, TCD (photo credit: Michael Emberley)

The Children’s Books Ireland Bold Girls project has been launched!

Here are some of the things:

Various resources, including a reading guide (featuring 20 essays from the Bold Girls, including myself), a resource guide, academic book suggestions, and more at the CBI website. For readers, parents, teachers, booksellers, researchers, etc.
A literary history of Wild Irish Girls by Dr Susan Cahill, based on a lecture given at TCD as part of the launch, including discussion of LT Meade, Godmother Of The School Story.
The Story Spinners exhibition in the Long Room in TCD, which will also be available online later this month.
Feature in the Irish Times by Sara Keating about it all, including thoughts from some of the writers, academics and kidlit advocates involved.

Bookish Thoughts: February

Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I yap about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were, whether they came out years ago or last week.

From the archives:

I remember when Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife was first published. I’d adored Prep, and found The Man of My Dreams less endearing but still pleasing, and then suddenly there was this novel inspired by the life of Laura Bush? God, who could be less interested? Who would even want to go there? Now, of course, George W Bush seems positively harmless in comparison to the current lunatic in the White House, which was certainly a factor in making this book seem less, well, icky when various writer-friends were recommending it on Twitter (Kindle edition on sale!). Even so, it’s unsettling at times to read sex scenes and be picturing him, and yes, yes you will. But all that being said – I absolutely loved this book. We begin with Alice in the White House in 2007 and then go back to her childhood and the things that make her – the relationship with her grandmother put under strain when she realises that a ‘good friend’ is more than that, a car crash that leaves her first love dead, her great love of children’s books that sees her become a children’s librarian. In her late twenties she meets Charlie, and is welcomed into a world of privilege and strangeness that eventually leads to his political career – and then a presidency that she hopes desperately he won’t win. It’s a thoroughly satisfying read and period piece, with that extra guilty frisson of being sort-of about real people.
Katelyn Detweiler’s Transcendent , sequel to Immaculate , picks up seventeen years later. Mina’s daughter, Iris, is now a teenager herself and about to discover the truth about her origins – that there is something mystical about her birth. And in a world just rocked by domestic terrorism at Disneyworld, of all places, the people want a saviour. Iris knows she’s just a girl – that any help she can provide is to do with being a figure to believe in, not anything she’s doing herself – but is there more to it than that? Pleasing and unpreachy and authentic.


This month’s shiny new reads:

YA fiction reviewed this month in the Irish Times includes Sara Barnard’s Goodbye Perfect , Mary Watson’s The Wren Hunt , Robin Benway’s Far From The Tree , Peter Bognanni’s Things I’m Seeing Without You & MT Anderson’s Landscape With Invisible Hand .
I very much enjoyed Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm , a memoir of childhood reading, with more thoughts over at HeadStuff .
Two delightful funny-but-sharp contemporary reads out now (or this week): Lucy Vine’s What Fresh Hell (wedding culture, hen parties, female friendships, & general modern life) and Sophie Kinsella’s Surprise Me (long-term relationships, keeping things ‘exciting’, & family secrets).


To watch out for:

All These Beautiful Strangers , a glossy and extremely page-turn-y YA thriller about privilege & families & boarding schools & murder, out in July.

Bookish Thoughts: January

Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I’ll yammer about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were. Mainly an ecletic mix of stuff you might like with some stuff that is just pure Claire (boarding school stories set in space, maybe? *hopeful face*)

From the archives:

Everyone has a book that they really and truly should have read under the age of twenty and somehow didn’t. For me, that was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (I know, I know!), which I didn’t do at school and have had on the to-read list for ages. So I dove into it and was underwhelmed in that way that you are when you do finally read one of those books that need to be read by age twenty. It is clearly Very Good. (It is also clearly In No Way a YA novel, despite often appearing on such lists, but that’s a whole other thing.) It is also a strange one to be recommended about race and tolerance et al (and actually it works better as a novel about small towns and family and not all the Issues) – I kept thinking of (the later, and actually-YA) Mildred D Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry semi-wistfully on that front. But hey, that’s one of the big ones ticked off the list of readerly shame. Next up, Joyce.


This month’s shiny new reads:

Lydia Ruffles’s debut The Taste of Blue Light is an utterly gorgeous account of an artsy boarding school (be still, my heart), memory loss, synaesthesia, terrorism, love and friendship. I devoured it.
Gwendoline Riley’s First Love is very beautifully written but deeply depressing on the matter of abusive relationships.
Shame On You by Amy Heydrenrich is a delightfully twisty and highly topical psychological thriller about a ‘clean eating’ guru who swears that her diet cured her cancer, and the doctor convinced she’s a fraud and responsible for the death of his fiancé. Both have secrets of their own, though, and the novel does a terrific job at depicting the addictive nature of Instagram ‘likes’ as well as the dangers of trial-by-media and public shaming.
The third in Jojo Moyes’s trilogy about Louisa Clark, Still Me , sees Lou in New York working as an assistant to a rich family, getting insights into the often-bizarre world of the privileged while at the same time missing her second love, Ambulance Sam, and encountering a young man who reminds her hugely of her first. While there is a feeling of cashing-in on the success of Me Before You here, there’s still a lot to admire here, particularly Louisa’s lack of interest in social-climbing and her passion for a job that in many books would be presented as a mere stopgap at best. And if you’ve read the second book, After You, this feels like a solid conclusion to the story.
I wrote about new YA from Nicholas Bowling ( Witchborn ), Anna Day ( The Fandom ), Paula Rawthorne ( Shell ), Samira Ahmed ( Love, Hate & Other Filters ), Adriana Mather ( How To Hang A Witch ) and Linni Ingemundsen ( The Unpredictability of Being Human ) for the Irish Times. (Also had to read Adriana Mather’s follow-up, Haunting The Deep , which does a great job at continuing some of the threads from the first while also offering up a new tangled magical mystery.)
Sarah Vaughan’s Anatomy of a Scandal is a thought-provoking and depressing account of privilege and its impact on later political scandals, looking at a rape accusation made of a charming young MP. It’s both very readable and very authentically grim.




To watch out for:

So. So. Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep is out in April. I’ve really enjoyed her first two novels, but oh my this was even more page-turny. When we meet Cordelia, pretending to live the high life on the French Riviera, there’s a corpse of a young man that she’s not sure what to do with – so, naturally, she ends up going to a fabulous party in the hope of reconnecting with some friends who might help her out of hard times. But that decomposing body is still there in the morning . . . cut back to Delia’s childhood on a tiny island on the west coast of Ireland, where the islanders keep to themselves and where she knows she is her Daddy’s most precious child. The account of how she gets from there to the dead body takes up most of the book, but the story has so many twists and shocks that there’s never an impatience for it all to fit together, just a trust that it will (and how!). Delia is a wonderfully unsympathetic but compelling protagonist, and the snippets of other characters along the way add just enough to let us see details of the things that Delia, in her self-obsession, would have no interest in. There are also folk tales from the island woven in, adding to the general sense of unease and foreboding. I loved this – it is so pleasingly messed-up. Certainly not for everyone, but honestly, I couldn’t put it down until I reached the last page.

I don’t wanna wait…

I wrote about Dawson’s Creek, as you do… have a read!

Bookish Thoughts: December

A quick note: I’m trying a new way of yapping about books here for 2018, somewhere in between listing-off and doing detailed reviews of each title read. In a shockingly original move, I’ll be doing this month-by-month, and dividing up into separate categories as I see fit (but mainly by publication date: older stuff, out recently, and coming soon). I love talking (and writing) about books, but for bloggish purposes I think I need something a little more loose and casual. (Let’s see how it goes.)

From the archives:

As you might guess from the ‘hey let’s try something new! While being organised!’ vibe, the end of the year brought with it reading a few self-help books and imagining a world where there is always the time and energy to be positive and goal-oriented and self-caring and all the other many things one is expected to be nowadays. What I like about Gretchen Rubin‘s The Happiness Project is that it is evidence-based (i.e. not bullshit), with a mix of philosophy, psychology and personal experience shaping the advice given. Rubin’s upfront about how she’s pursuing an individual plan but also rightly notes that often noting the detailed specifics of someone else’s experience, no matter how different from our own, can be much more useful than generic advice. Her year-long project (more than a decade old now) focuses on tackling a different area of her life each month with a view to becoming happier. She wasn’t terribly unhappy to begin with, but as with mindfulness, long-term attitude-changers work best when they’re introduced at a relatively stable time in your life, and she’s also very much focused on building happiness into her life now, rather than going off into the woods/backpacking across Thailand/whatever as a way of Finding Yourself. (This appeals to me hugely, and I also appreciate that throughout Rubin makes the distinction between ‘unhappiness’ and ‘depression’, and can’t quite do meditation, and is open about when certain life-affirming things still leave her cranky.) Aside from a slightly frustrating engagement with ‘money’ (one of her themes) – while Rubin realises intellectually that the lack of money creates stress, like ill health, that drowns out so much else, she doesn’t quite know what to say about it – it’s a hopeful and inspiring, low-nonsense read.
I’m a huge fan of Jennifer Weiner and have been running out of her older titles to read, but Little Earthquakes was still waiting for me. Three very different women become friends at a pregnancy yoga class, while another watches them from afar, returned to town after a tragedy. As with Weiner’s other books, the frustrations and joys of family life are explored skilfully, with enough drama to keep the pages turning frantically. And as with her other books the apparently ‘frothy’ themes (what we call the things that involve female spaces, in other words) are shot through with a serious bolt of sadness.

I have mixed feelings about Julia Cameron (there’s a bit too much God in there for my liking, whether you refer to him/it as a Great Creator or otherwise) but there is something terribly soothing about reading her essays on creativity. Like The Right To Write, The Sound of Paper features her beloved Taos, New Mexico and uses the landscape to prompt reflections on creativity and perseverance.


This month’s shiny new reads:

Having had Maggie Nelson‘s The Argonauts be firmly recommended to me as a Must Read in spring 2016, I naturally waited until winter 2017 to actually start reading it. I felt intimidated by how clever it sounded – the book explores family, gender, sexuality, life and death via memoir, art writing and a heavy dose of critical and cultural theory – and even though I’d been reassured it was a ‘quick read’ (I did read it in less than 24 hours) it did continue to intimidate. Nelson cites a wide range of writers and theorists as she takes us through her journey, and even though in context all the quotes are clear enough, my own academic training has me feeling twitchy: yes but surely it’s more complicated than that? Am I really getting all of this? Do I understand the whole theoretical structure or am I just picking up bits and pieces, magpie-style, to cobble together my own certainly-limited framework?

Intellectual angst aside, it’s certainly one to read and full of things to ponder.

Why Can’t Everything Just Stay The Same? is a memoir by Irish writer and performer Stefanie Preissner, who first came to my attention (and a whole lot of other people’s) with her one-woman show, Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend . Like the show, parts of this book are in rhyme, and feel spoken-word-ish; unlike the show it feels a little more slick and cautious in terms of what’s revealed (the use of painkillers to soothe emotional hurt is barely touched on, while there’s a certain wariness about feminist issues that feels shaped by PR advisors). But then again, given how much we punish women for, oh, everything, particularly anything shared in public (and Preissner notes being cyber-bullied and excluded by her female friends relatively recently, too), why not be savvy about what you put into print about yourself before your thirtieth birthday? There’s a lot in here to like, particularly about not quite fitting in to typical college culture, the cringe of sending a misspelled text to the worst possible people, the consumerist addictions of the ’90s and ’00s, and what it means to be a young person in today’s screwing-you-over Ireland.

YA-wise I wrote about a number of new fabulous titles for The Irish Times , including Shirley-Anne McMillan’s The Unknowns (a non-Troubles Belfast novel!) and Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down , a novel-in-verse about gun violence.


To watch out for:


I loved Emma Healey‘s Elizabeth Is Missing; Whistle In The Dark is her second novel, out in May. At its heart is a similar mystery: Jen’s fifteen-year-old daughter Lana vanished for four days during a mother-daughter painting holiday. Now she’s back, but insists she can’t remember where she’s been, or what happened. Local stories recount tales of children being pulled down to hell and returned to the mortal world, while Jen also agonises about the potential of assault. The depiction of difficult-teenage-girl-ness is done beautifully, and the writing is skillful.
As a long-time devotee of Cathy Kelly, I was delighted to get an early copy of The Year That Changed Everything (out in February). Ginger, Sam and Callie each celebrate a significant birthday on a day that changes everything, and we follow them over the course of a year – in which Ginger gains self-confidence, Sam deals with new motherhood and the shadow of her own distant mother’s parenting, and Callie’s rags-to-riches fairytale shatters. Tackling addiction, body image, and societal expectations, this is a warm-but-never-saccharine account of modern life for women.
Best known for her smart, funny and feminist YA, Holly Bourne‘s first adult novel, How Do You Like Me Now? , is out in June. Tori is in that early-thirties panic as everyone around her settles down, has babies, gets mortgages and does all the proper grown-up stuff – meanwhile, she’s trying to figure out how to follow up the success of her bestselling self-help book (written in her mid-twenties) both in her career and in the life that seemed like it had everything figured out. This is pleasingly insightful and authentic; I particularly loved the role of female friendships in it (I am predictable like that).

New things!

I am completely smitten with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and wrote about how it handles mental illness and rom-com-esque wish fulfillment for Headstuff.
For writing.ie – YA fiction and ‘issues’ and also some inspiration & motivation for 2018.

New things!

Some recent things:

on ‘sneaky abortion novels’ & Irish fiction
some notes on very good YA books this year
CBI’s Bold Girls project & why it’s fabulous
The ‘room of shame’ for women seeking the morning-after pill
YA reviews, including the latest Daniel Handler book

Christmassy things!

So my two babies, I mean businesses (I blame Ann M Martin for my ongoing confusion in this regard) have Christmas gift options!

At Banshee there’s a Christmas gift stocking available, featuring the first five issues with a red or green tote bag. You can also purchase an annual subscription as a gift.
At the Big Smoke Writing Factory the winter/spring 2018 schedule is now available and you can order a gift certificate for the human of your choice, or (if you know them and their schedule very well) book them in for a course (including online classes).