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Showing posts from December 22, 2024

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy: book review

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Trespasses  by Louise Kennedy Overview: It's Belfast during the Troubles. Cushla lives with her mother who is an alcoholic, still drowning in grief after her father's passing years before. Her brother runs a pub, and she teaches at the Catholic school, picking up shifts at the pub afterwards. Over the course of a school year, Cushla meets a married Protestant barrister in the pub and begins an affair, and she connects herself to a struggling family of a boy in her class, her efforts to help them drawing both herself and the family into more problems. Cushla is genuinely just trying her best in the backdrop of a difficult, scary time. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 5 Cushla is twenty-four and teaches a group of seven-year-olds in P3. She's openhearted and so kind but feels somewhat adrift in her life. Her world exists between her older brother, who holds himself as the head of the household even as he has his own young family to contend with, and her mother, who requires more moth...

The Reading, Writing, and Me Best Fiction Picks of 2024

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It's list season, and my holiday gift to you this year is that I'm doing two "Best of" book lists this year to talk about even more books I loved. This is the classic style list, entirely comprised of books released this year that I haven't stopped thinking about. The next list, coming closer to the end of the year, will be my highest ranked book of every month of 2024 to capture some of the backlist I got to this year that you won't see here.  To keep this list readable when you've probably already read so many, I broke this into a Top 5 that are ranked, summarized, quoted, and include a blurb about why I chose them. If you've been following the blog all year, you'll be familiar with my love for many of these. What follows is an unranked Honorable Mention section with books that have clung in my brain for a while, some of which surprised me. These are not what I'd necessarily deal technically best, but they just captured me in one way or anoth...

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett: book review

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Wild Houses  by Colin Barrett Overview: Nicky and Doll are high school sweethearts who both come from challenging family situations. Nicky's parents died when she was a young teen, leaving her mostly alone, and Doll's brother became involved with drug dealing and his father left for Canada. The pair get sucked into the small time drug dealing world in Ballina when Doll's brother, Cillian, falls through on a deal with the Ferdia brothers. When Doll is kidnapped and brought to Dev's house by the brothers, Doll and Dev realize they've found more in common in their strange intersection than they expected. This is a kidnapping story, but none of them are very good at it. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 These characters are all lovably lost. Nicky is too devoted to her high school boyfriend and his family because she no longer has a family of her own. Doll is a teenage boy that's too self-absorbed for his own good. Dev is living in the countryside with his late mother's ...