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A review by shimmery
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
3.0
Difficult and emotionally draining to read. This is the story of a toxic relationship told from the perspective of a woman in her early 20s. While I admire the candidness of the writing and the way the novel does not shy away from very difficult ground, I felt uncomfortable in places with the idea that I was supposed to hate Ciaran (the character the narrator is in a relationship with) and sympathise with the narrator. Don’t get me wrong, Ciaran is awful but the narrator is often equally manipulative, possessive and inappropriate.
The short scene in which she meets up with her first love and she acknowledges that she ‘makes a meal out of’ Ciaran’s faults while skipping over her own transgressions and the person she is speaking to points out how she thinks only of herself (she does not ask her friend anything about himself) I felt to be a reassuring turning point of the book but then felt that it slipped back in to being all about Ciaran’s wrongs.
Maybe it’s unfair of me to feel that the book doesn’t go far enough in getting the narrator to fully evolve as she does take responsibility in the end and acknowledge the part she has to play. The uneasy feeling I am left with could just be a result of the very sad subject matter.
The short scene in which she meets up with her first love and she acknowledges that she ‘makes a meal out of’ Ciaran’s faults while skipping over her own transgressions and the person she is speaking to points out how she thinks only of herself (she does not ask her friend anything about himself) I felt to be a reassuring turning point of the book but then felt that it slipped back in to being all about Ciaran’s wrongs.
Maybe it’s unfair of me to feel that the book doesn’t go far enough in getting the narrator to fully evolve as she does take responsibility in the end and acknowledge the part she has to play. The uneasy feeling I am left with could just be a result of the very sad subject matter.