Here’s a novel where I wanted to like it more than I actually did like it. I think it’s because I heard that The Glorious Heresies had won a billion prizes and gotten great reviews everywhere, so it was hard for the actual novel to live up to that.

Still, there are some great characters in this story, a really wide variety of different personalities and goals,  and they feel believable, even if sometimes (often) I felt like the prose was too wild, flowery and energetic for me. Sometimes the effusive Irish ramblings made me think of Maeve Binchy, in a good way, and I think I prefer the ramblings about small-town gossip than those about murder and drugs and prison.