[Bookworm_Girl]

By the end of book I was on the side of liking it. However it wasn't an easy journey along the way. I too found the crassness off-putting. I thought some of the prose was quite beautiful and emotionally dark yet tinged with dry wit and then you would be jarred by some of the vulgar imagery inserted. I assume that the author meant to make the reader uncomfortable given the subject matter, but it was over the top and could have been more sensitive. I read multiple interviews in which the author emphasized the following viewpoint about covering such subject material.

Spoiler:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...ht-394987.html

As the long-buried secrets of these decades come to light, a squalid and banal episode of sexual abuse almost inevitably features among them. Did she worry about the over-familiarity of this motif today? "I'm aware how jaded it is in novels in general," she replies, "and I'm also aware how important it is not to use what is a terrible human experience just for the sake of a book." Yet she also notes that "There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread, there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge... So I knew all of this. And I went there anyway."

She went there in part because, for an Irish woman writer even 45 years after Edna O'Brien's breakthrough novels, the right to such frankness still needs to be seized: "In some way, when I deal with sexual material, I feel that I'm reclaiming or repossessing some territory that's been taken away from women by male writers."

I was not liking it very much for the first half. When I got to the secret at the mid-point, I stopped and went back to the beginning. I intended to just read the first few chapters to try to reframe my perspective. However, I kept going and read the first half all over again. That made a major shift in reading the book for me. Probably because I glossed over the jarring parts I knew were coming now and could focus on the main theme of the book as well as pick out more details tying everything together.

This book reminded me of different elements of three novels that the club has read: Tirra Lirra by the River as fantasyfan has mentioned, the exploration of grief in Nora Webster and the stream of consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway.

I am not surprised to find this book was favored by the literary critics and has polarizing viewpoints by the general public. Amazon US ratings show 3.1 stars made up of 42% @ 4/5, 14% @ 3 and 44% @ 1/2. Similarly Amazon UK ratings show 3.0 stars made up of 43% @ 4/5, 8% @ 3 and 49% @ 1/2. Goodreads also gives it 3 stars, but the distribution is almost equal thirds.