A review by rae607
The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

4.0

I was inspired to read this 1960 novel after learning about Edna O'Brien's work when she died this year. "The Country Girls," a brief novel that is the first of a trilogy, follows two girls growing up in the Irish countryside. Red-headed Cait is studious and has what we'd now call a "difficult home life," while her friend (and sometimes frenemy) Baba enjoys a somewhat more well-to-do upbringing and greater conventional beauty -- but less success at school. With spare, unflinching prose, O'Brien sketches the trials of their lives and their meager hopes for a more interesting life in Dublin. "The Country Girls" was shocking in its time, but what shocks the modern reader is how limited choices were even for a very intelligent girl of the era.