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A review by booklane
Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.5
This acutely observed novel opens with Kate throwing the titular dinner party, which, far from being a celebration, brings together the family on the 16th anniversary of Kate’s twin sister’s death. Quietly, without apparent drama, tensions emerge and shortly the Baked Alaska ends up in the bin.
The novel goes back in time, home in rural Ireland and to Kate’s first years as Trinity student, examining Kate’s dysfunctional family, including her manipulative, half-crazed, abusive, embarrassing mother, and her twin sister, her mother’s favourite, who was so much extrovert than her. Exploring guilt, family relationships, feelings of inadequacy, loss, surviving and eating disorders.
Gilmartin painstakingly lingers on details recreating mood and atmospheres. She brings out the undercurrents of tension in daily life under an appearance of complete normality that is similar to what we find in Ann Enright, who aptly is the author of the praise on the book cover. This novel enters in full rights the canon of novels centering on life in rural Ireland, caught in the Nineties at a time of change in values, which emerges through the young siblings’ experiences and their mother’s hysterical reactions. In this slow burner, the depiction of how thwarted and damaging family relations can be and the portrait of Kate’s struggle to cope and what she does to her body are shocking.
A good debut. 3.5
My thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC via NetGalley
The novel goes back in time, home in rural Ireland and to Kate’s first years as Trinity student, examining Kate’s dysfunctional family, including her manipulative, half-crazed, abusive, embarrassing mother, and her twin sister, her mother’s favourite, who was so much extrovert than her. Exploring guilt, family relationships, feelings of inadequacy, loss, surviving and eating disorders.
Gilmartin painstakingly lingers on details recreating mood and atmospheres. She brings out the undercurrents of tension in daily life under an appearance of complete normality that is similar to what we find in Ann Enright, who aptly is the author of the praise on the book cover. This novel enters in full rights the canon of novels centering on life in rural Ireland, caught in the Nineties at a time of change in values, which emerges through the young siblings’ experiences and their mother’s hysterical reactions. In this slow burner, the depiction of how thwarted and damaging family relations can be and the portrait of Kate’s struggle to cope and what she does to her body are shocking.
A good debut. 3.5
My thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC via NetGalley
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Eating disorder