Book-review post!
Catching up on book reviews of those books that are written for the grown-up variety of human…
Rosita Sweetman – Fathers Come First
A novel from 1974 republished by Lilliput last year, and (fun fact) featuring cover photography from a former Trinity classmate of mine. This is the story of a middle-class girl’s coming-of-age in a society that values women mainly for their relationship to men, and hovers between being very much of its time and very pertinent to today’s world. I think I preferred it thematically more than aesthetically, but it is a book well worth checking out.
Emma Healey – Elizabeth Is Missing
This is a heartbreaking book with a decades-old mystery at its centre but is more memorable for its wonderful portrayal of an unreliable narrator – Maud, who is slowly losing her mind, who can’t remember huge parts of her day, who clings only to this one thing she is sure of: Elizabeth is missing. Her well-meaning family and neighbours try to reassure her, but are also frustrated with her; the blanks we see in Maud’s memory leave us feeling confused and upset in the same way she is. This is a gripping read – but an intense one, too.
Anne Enright – The Green Road
(review copy from NetGalley)
I have a lot of feelings. Oh, a lot of feelings. I love this book, first and foremost. It’s gorgeous, it’s compelling, it’s a family-reunion-story that swoops around the world and across time while also having amazing short-story-levels-of-intensity moments about each of the characters. It does not have as much of the Enrightish things that I love – namely, difficult Irish women in the first person (the more typical Enrightish telling of this tale would be all about Hanna, and I would read the hell out of that book) – but it also has many pleasing things (I keep describing this book as having ‘a pleasing amount of gay sex’, which I probably need to stop doing, but yeah). I wanted it to be twice as long, not because there is anything missing from it but because there is so much in it and I wanted more; I could have easily read about these characters for another 400 pages or so. I don’t know if I love it as much as, say, The Forgotten Waltz, but I think it is probably in scope and ambition and story her best book yet. Out in May. Read read read.
Meg Cabot – Royal Wedding
(review copy from Edelweiss)
I am not as crazy about this book as I’d like to be, even though I love Meg Cabot’s adult fiction. I think taking a character from a YA series into adulthood is always tricky, and one of my main problems with this was that all the old characters are still around, even though Mia’s in her mid-twenties, so it does feel rather contrived. I liked the pop culture commentary and the challenges of being an adult royal and public figure, but other aspects – like Mia having lost her stepfather – didn’t quite ring true. It’s basically seeing more of the characters we already know, rather than exploring the realistic changes that might take place as someone grows up. A fun read but not necessarily one to rush out to get. (Also out this summer: the first in the spinoff MG series, about Mia’s newly-discovered half-sister.)
Miranda July – The First Bad Man
Reviewed for Arena (RTE).
