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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
This book is more relevant than ever, with conflicts such as that in Gaza and Ukraine being a heartbreaking piece of evening news to be watched before settling into watching the new Netflix series with a piping hot takeaway. This book doesn't allow you to look away, doesn't allow unrealistically happy endings - it is unflinchingly real. As Eilish struggles to hold her gradually disintegrating family together in the face of her father's Alzheimers, her husbands arrest and potential murder and her son's militant opposition to the regime the reality of a single woman fighting a seemingly omnipotent regime come to life.
Never at any point did I feel it was fair to judge her decision not to leave earlier - as she herself points out not only was it unrealistic with her son's passport but it's also a criticism made with the benefit of hindsight and shames those who have grown with the land for not wanting to abandon their country and their home. The ending is especially important given the surge of extremist anti-immigration rhetoric in the UK. For the splintered family there is eventually no choice but to escape the darkness, to take the hugely dangerous choice to escape through the sea and hope that such a risk will give her children any chance of survival and freedom. This book does not allow you to dehumanise those who have no choice but to stay and no choice but to flee. Every single person on a boat, taking the riskiest journey of their lifetime, is a human being with a story and a family who simply wish for freedom.
The only reason this book isn't rated five stars is that the lack of speech marks, paragraphs and separated dialogue made it extremely confusing to figure out what was actually spoken and who was delivering the line. As such the book flows less smoothly and requires an extra layer of concentration simply to figure out who is speaking. Nevertheless despite this small criticism the following of my favourite quotes from the book highlight why this book won the Booker Prize in 2023:
---> "The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."
---> "If you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing."
---> "History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet."
---> "Words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life."
Never at any point did I feel it was fair to judge her decision not to leave earlier - as she herself points out not only was it unrealistic with her son's passport but it's also a criticism made with the benefit of hindsight and shames those who have grown with the land for not wanting to abandon their country and their home. The ending is especially important given the surge of extremist anti-immigration rhetoric in the UK. For the splintered family there is eventually no choice but to escape the darkness, to take the hugely dangerous choice to escape through the sea and hope that such a risk will give her children any chance of survival and freedom. This book does not allow you to dehumanise those who have no choice but to stay and no choice but to flee. Every single person on a boat, taking the riskiest journey of their lifetime, is a human being with a story and a family who simply wish for freedom.
The only reason this book isn't rated five stars is that the lack of speech marks, paragraphs and separated dialogue made it extremely confusing to figure out what was actually spoken and who was delivering the line. As such the book flows less smoothly and requires an extra layer of concentration simply to figure out who is speaking. Nevertheless despite this small criticism the following of my favourite quotes from the book highlight why this book won the Booker Prize in 2023:
---> "The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."
---> "If you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing."
---> "History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet."
---> "Words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life."
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
emotional
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Sickeningly absorbing, terrifyingly immediate. I couldn’t put this down but there’s an awful finality to having finished it that will be hard to get past.
It’s described as dystopian but it’s hard to consider what happens in this story to be an “alternate reality” when it is reality right now for so many people. Lives ripped apart by violence, condemned to facelessness. And hardly unfamiliar to the Irish people, especially those who’ve lived under English repression and IRA resistance.
The prose is on-rushing, lyrical, and suffused with the immediacy of the story. In a few places Lynch uses adverbs or adjectives as verbs themselves- the light greens, the feeling suddens. The relentlessness is textual. The lack of quotation marks means dialogue is often fused into long run-on sentences, there’s no time to pause.
I’m rattled and humbled and angry.
It’s described as dystopian but it’s hard to consider what happens in this story to be an “alternate reality” when it is reality right now for so many people. Lives ripped apart by violence, condemned to facelessness. And hardly unfamiliar to the Irish people, especially those who’ve lived under English repression and IRA resistance.
The prose is on-rushing, lyrical, and suffused with the immediacy of the story. In a few places Lynch uses adverbs or adjectives as verbs themselves- the light greens, the feeling suddens. The relentlessness is textual. The lack of quotation marks means dialogue is often fused into long run-on sentences, there’s no time to pause.
I’m rattled and humbled and angry.
5 Stars • Dystopian, Political, Speculative Fiction, Ireland
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book has had my heart beating fast, especially from the 2/3 mark. The pacing was excellent, the main character felt so real and even despite the story being written in the third person, the reader gets a great insight into Eilish’s mind. I also felt that the formatting of the book (no speech marks and one continuous paragraph) added so much to building the tension and feeling of overwhelm. It wasn’t super groundbreaking but it did pack a punch.
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Diverse cast of characters:
No
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
Loveable characters:
No