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Siobhan Dowd
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Book
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Publisher | David Fickling Books | ||
ISBN | 9780099488163 | ||
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Reviewer
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Jayne
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Synopsis
After Shell's mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister. Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with childhood friend, Declan, charming, eloquent and persuasive. But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and the centre of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country. The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.
Review
This is a brilliant yet heartbreakingly debut novel by Siobahn Dowd.
The author has written this story around a family in the South of Ireland where the daughter of the family is having to hold the family together, because a father has become an alchoholic. She has no one to turn to when things start to go wrong and the outcome is not one any young person should have to go through.
The story is so moving and it shows how little country villages can twist and turn incidents to their own agenda and have people pilleried by the village folk just by blatent gossip.
I loved this moving story and feel for Shell the heroine, she shows such presence and patience with all around her and is just a wonderful young home-maker. The language is beautiful and the writing is sensitive on this difficult subject.
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