A review by anne978
The Green Road by Anne Enright

A nice, slightly loosely structured story of one Irish family. Enright shortly describes a shared childhood, and then goes on to give you a view of the four children and their mother's lives some thirty years onwards. Thirty years is a big gap, and Enright is not interested in explaining why the characters ended up where they did. That is mostly fine, but Enright sometimes identifies the characters by certain traits, especially Hanna (the washed-up actress and alcoholic) and Emmet (the disillusioned, unable-to-love, Third-World doctor). I think her purpose was to write a fragmentary novel that does not give the reader too much background information, but sometimes you just need to make some connections to make the characters turn into persons, especially when they are main characters.