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barbarasbooks 's review for:
Ordinary Saints
by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
When a book opens with the line “The first time I kissed a girl my brother died” it can go a couple of ways. Quirkily humorous? Grimly prophetic? Let me caution you; there is little humour.
Following the tragic death of her younger brother Ferdia, Jacinta (the narrator of the tale), escapes her grief and the religiosity of her home, and reinvents herself by moving to London, where she can be truly herself and embrace her queer lifestyle.
“I’m used to having a double life, a neat guillotine slice separating childhood from adulthood”.
The announcement of her brother Ferdia’s consideration for sainthood draws her back to confront her family in Ireland, to discover that little has changed. Ferdia is venerated in his home, Jacinta is marginalised.
This book is unsettling. Whilst admiring the skill of a first time novelist to evoke such an emotional response it didn’t make for pleasurable reading.
It’s relentlessly critical of Irish Catholicism, and thoroughly steeped in its origins and history in a way that made me feel my religious knowledge was woefully inadequate. But if you want to understand how saints are created, and view up close the hypocrisies and paradoxes of the process you’ll find it compelling reading.
It’s sad in that way that only Irish fiction can be. Anyone who has lost a child will struggle with the ways in which this anguish is invoked:
“Out of the house so saturated with a deep morgueish chill that many mornings I’ve had to remind myself that in our family only one of us was dead.”
This book made me so consistently miserable that I hesitate to recommend it. But I admired it hugely.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death