Trespasses by Louise Kennedy: book review

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...