Reviews

Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

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jilianh's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

1.75

First off, I just want to say it is commendable that the author was able to share such an intimate and vulnerable memoir with the world. Her actual story and experiences are not what my rating is based on, and I am sure there is definitely an audience out there who will really love this book- it just wasn't for me.

This book was incredibly slow and repetitive. I REALLY had to push through the last 40%.
It somehow managed to be lyrical and descriptive, but also vague at the same time? There was little in the way of details for her actual hardships but we got countless different poetic ways of explaining what a thin place was or descriptions of wildlife around her. This was definitely more of a project for herself to heal and collect her thoughts regarding her trauma, not so much a memoir of the troubles or trauma itself (as the byline suggests). Because of this, it repeats itself over and over and over again. While it was interesting to have the Brexit comparison being made, it was circled back to a few times from a surface level and I never really felt like I got much more out of it than "division is bad, I'm worried history is repeating itself". Same goes for many of the other repeated topics. This book could easily have been 1/3-1/2 the size and I would have left with the exact same impression. In fact, I think it would have been more impactful because some of the early lyricism was really striking, but the signal to noise ratio just started to get worse. By the end I was kind of wanting to just DNF because the pretty words held no new substance.