Take a photo of a barcode or cover
wordsofclover 's review for:
All We Shall Know
by Donal Ryan
I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest feedback.
All We Shall Know is based around 33-year-old Melody who has just discovered she is pregnant with her 17-year-old student Martin Toppy's baby. Melody now needs to figure out what she’s going to do, while dealing with the opinions of the entire small Irish town she lives in and ingratiating herself in the traveller community Martin is from.
This is pretty interesting. Donal Ryan is masterful at weaving the stories and personalities of small Irish towns and communities full of opinions and religious observations and that’s certainly true for this one. The story is told week by week of Melody’s pregnancy and we see her face a lot of criticism and hate from the community for having a baby that is not her husbands (it was pretty intriguing to see how no-one believed her when she told some of the scandalous things that the men of the town had been up to but they were, of course, happy to judge her for an affair).
Melody isn’t a particularly nice character. She became mean and bitter in her marriage and it’s clear that she never made Pat’s life easy for him. But then she is also kind towards Martin, and Mary Crothery - another traveler that she helps learn to read - and is often a place for Mary to come to when she needs someone. Mary and Melody are both living similar lives in a way - rejected by their husbands because of baby issues, shunned by the community they live in and it was great to see the friendship they weaved. I also enjoyed the emphasis on the Irish traveling community in this from the expectations of the women to stay at home, have babies and keep house from a young age and what happens when this isn’t an option by choice or not, their views on outsiders and the whole deal with traveler feuds and how they’re sparked and dealt with. But this book had a great way of showing that the traveler community is just a community of normal people with certain values that they deem important and uphold but at the end of the day family is everything.
I definitely was not expecting the ending, it was fantastic and took me completely out of the blue.
All We Shall Know is based around 33-year-old Melody who has just discovered she is pregnant with her 17-year-old student Martin Toppy's baby. Melody now needs to figure out what she’s going to do, while dealing with the opinions of the entire small Irish town she lives in and ingratiating herself in the traveller community Martin is from.
This is pretty interesting. Donal Ryan is masterful at weaving the stories and personalities of small Irish towns and communities full of opinions and religious observations and that’s certainly true for this one. The story is told week by week of Melody’s pregnancy and we see her face a lot of criticism and hate from the community for having a baby that is not her husbands (it was pretty intriguing to see how no-one believed her when she told some of the scandalous things that the men of the town had been up to but they were, of course, happy to judge her for an affair).
Melody isn’t a particularly nice character. She became mean and bitter in her marriage and it’s clear that she never made Pat’s life easy for him. But then she is also kind towards Martin, and Mary Crothery - another traveler that she helps learn to read - and is often a place for Mary to come to when she needs someone. Mary and Melody are both living similar lives in a way - rejected by their husbands because of baby issues, shunned by the community they live in and it was great to see the friendship they weaved. I also enjoyed the emphasis on the Irish traveling community in this from the expectations of the women to stay at home, have babies and keep house from a young age and what happens when this isn’t an option by choice or not, their views on outsiders and the whole deal with traveler feuds and how they’re sparked and dealt with. But this book had a great way of showing that the traveler community is just a community of normal people with certain values that they deem important and uphold but at the end of the day family is everything.
I definitely was not expecting the ending, it was fantastic and took me completely out of the blue.