Ronan Hession - Panenka

Ronan Hession - Panenka 

4⭐

Genre:  Irish Literature, Novella, Contemporary, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Pages: 164

Format: Paperback 

Publisher:  Bluemoose Books Ltd

Date Published: 2nd February 2022

 

Book Blurb: 

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story. Panenka has spent 25 years living with the disastrous mistakes of his past, which have made him an exile in his home town and cost him his dearest relationships. Now aged 50, Panenka begins to rebuild an improvised family life with his estranged daughter and her seven year old son.

But at night, Panenka suffers crippling headaches that he calls his Iron Mask. Faced with losing everything, he meets Esther, a woman who has come to live in the town to escape her own disappointments. Together, they find resonance in each other’s experiences and learn new ways to let love into their broken lives.

My Review: 

Joseph misses a crucial penalty against a rival team that could have taken the team Seneca to the next level. The whole fan community is disappointed, as he had so much potential to be the best. The whole fan community also hates Joseph, as he missed a crucial chance for the team to progress. His career is over in a heartbeat, and everyone starts calling him Panenka. 25 years later, he is still holding the guilt of what he is done, he can’t let go of his past and his mistake. Panenka is now 50 and trying to reconcile with his daughter Marie-Therese, who he abandoned after his guilt took over 25 years ago, he is also battling an illness about which only a 40-year-old hairdresser and his only friend knows, all, whilst his team Seneca trying to come back to the top after 25 years in a low.

I was hoping this novel will be something special, as I had so many high hopes for it. However, it was quite boring and not as engaging as I thought it would be. Most of the story is about Panenka’s guilt and self-pity, and not much was explained about how his career ended and there wasn’t a lot on football. I was really expecting more of this story to revolve around football. For me, this book felt without an ending. It just ended without much resolution. What I did enjoy about this book was that it was very beautifully written and easy to read.

Overall: A very average book that I had so many high hopes for, but I was really let down. I did enjoy the writing of this book and its premise, but just not how it was executed. 

About the Author:

Rónán Hession, known as Mumblin' Deaf Ro, is an Irish blues musician and novelist. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children and supports Watford Football Club. Hession has to date published two acclaimed novels: Leonard and Hungry Paul and Panenka. 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/18776546.Ronan_Hession

Kirby Porter - Frances Creighton: Found and Lost

Kirby Porter - Frances Creighton: Found and Lost  

4⭐

Genre: Fiction, Irish Literature, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance  

Pages: 204 

Format: Paperback 

Publisher:  Envelope Books 

Date Published: 4th November 2021

Huge thank you to Evenlope Books for sending me this book to read and review.

 

Book Blurb: 

Unable to cope with the death of his girlfriend, Londoner Michael Roberts tries to find comfort in memories of another time and another place when he was in love for the first time.

 

But that first time was as a schoolboy in Belfast, at the start of The Troubles in the late 1960s, and in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian.

 

To his surprise and increasing anguish his memories—long buried—prove elusive, so that finding out what had really happened and why it got suppressed becomes more and more of an obsession.

 

As Michael gradually uncovers forgotten truths he starts to learn something that challenges everything he ever knew about himself and the person he has become. 

 

Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the underlying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.

​

My Review: 

Very beautifully written book about someone who is trying to come to terms with grief, whilst exploring his own pasts and life choices. It is a very short book, that I devoured in a couple of hours.

The book follows Michael as she learns that his girlfriend has passed away. His grief takes him to his past, especially his youth and his first love a girl called Frances. He can’t stop thinking about where Frances might be now, and he takes the reader through his complicated love story with Frances where he had to choose either her or his family. This book looks deeper than just Michael's love story. It explores reasons why Michael is the way he is. It looks at Belfast in the light of The Troubles. It also explores Michael's guilt about what happened with both girls he loved.

Overall: Although being a very short story, this book packs in so much. It definitely made me so invested and interested from page 1. It does play on your heartstrings and makes you think deeper about our culture and upbringing and how it all affects our choices and us later in life. Another amazing release by Envelope Books that I can’t recommend enough! 

About the Author

Kirby Porter grew up in Belfast near the Harland and Wolff shipyard where a grandfather and a great- grandfather helped build the Titanic between 1909–12. He studied Russian at Queen’s University Belfast and took further degrees at the University of London and the University of Wales. He became Head of Library Services for a North London borough, gave talks on Russian and Irish Poetry, and was an active trade unionist. Back in Belfast he created library services for both the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as teaching courses in Information Management at the University of Ulster. He is now a grandfather and lives on the east coast of Scotland.

https://www.envelopebooks.co.uk/frances-creighton-found-and-lost

Catherine Prasifka - None of This Is Serious

Catherine Prasifka - None of This Is Serious 

5⭐

Genre: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Irish Literature

Pages: 304

Format: Paperback

Publisher:  Canongate 

Date Published: 7th April 2022

Huge thank you to Canongate for sending me a copy of this book to read and review. 

 

Book Blurb: 

Dublin student life is ending for Sophie and her friends. They've got everything figured out, and Sophie feels left behind as they all start to go their separate ways. She's overshadowed by her best friend Grace. She's been in love with Finn for as long as she's known him. And she's about to meet Rory, who's suddenly available to her online.

At a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen.

None of This Is Serious is about the uncertainty and absurdity of being alive today. It's about balancing the real world with the online, and the vulnerabilities in yourself, your relationships, your body. At its heart, this is a novel about the friendships strong enough to withstand anything.

My Review: 

Why is this book so relatable? It perfectly portrays how hard it is to be in your twenties in the 2010s or/and 2020s, where most of your life is dictated by social media and the internet culture. It beautifully displays that even though you are connected with the whole world, you can still feel so lonely, out of place like an outsider and lost.

The book follows Sophie who just graduated from university and feels lost, whilst her friends slowly move on with their new jobs, relationships and friendship groups. Sophie feels stuck, as she can’t find a job, her friendships are stagnating and her love life is a mess. She is vulnerable and anxious, as she has these dreams about having a house and a great career, but all she is getting is rejection, whilst her friends and her sister just waltz into a job. She also feels lost between two men, her love for one and her newfound connection with the other. For Sophie internet and social media is an escape, there she finds the answers she needs, where she feels she can be herself and where she can find peace. That is until ‘The Crack’ appears in the sky across the world. The whole internet is exploding and Sophie realises that her ‘save place’ became just another place where she is an anxious, lonely and vulnerable individual.

I loved how this book explores both relationships in real life and online, quite in-depth, as well as shows how sometimes the online world can be an escape, yet sometimes it consumes you and makes you feel worse about reality. This book also perfectly balances current societal issues with everyday life, it just felt very relatable. It explores more than just relationships and love, it also explores the importance of friendships and socialising in the real world, especially when we live most of our lives online.

The character exploration in this book was just so on point. I loved Sophie's character. Yes, she was annoying at times, but I could relate to her so much. I have been her at some points in my life and I felt like her many times too. Sophie portrays that sometimes your mind is your enemy and it is so true, especially when you are trying to navigate real life and the uncertainty that comes with it. She is flawed, raw, real and imperfectly perfect, just as any of us are.

I also really liked the concept of ‘The Crack’, since it was supposed to portray Covid-19, as how slowly from panic and the unknown, ‘The Crack’ became a new normal, whilst also spreading rumours, and conspiracy theories online.

Overall: I loved this book so much, as it was full of relatable characters (not just Sophie, although Sophie was very relatable), and subjects that are so relevant and important to talk about. I really enjoyed Prasifka’s writing too, as the novel was so easy to read and it did grip me from the very beginning.  Can’t wait to see what she writes next! 

About the Author:

Catherine Prasifka was born in Dublin in 1996. She studied English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and has an MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. She is obsessed with learning about how stories work and has ruined nearly all of her favourite books and movies by overanalysing them. She works as a creative writing teacher in Dublin. None of This Is Serious is her first novel.

https://canongate.co.uk/contributors/17511-catherine-prasifka/#:~:text=Catherine%20Prasifka%20was%20born%20in,and%20movies%20by%20overanalysing%20them.

Donal Ryan - The Queen of Dirt Island

Donal Ryan - The Queen of Dirt Island 

3.5⭐

Genre: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature

Pages: 256 

Format: Hardback Proof 

Publisher:  Double Day, Transworld Books 

Date Published: 18th August 2022 

 Huge thank you to Transworld and Double Day Books for sending me a proof copy of this book to read and review. 

 

Book Blurb: 

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know - in spite of what the neighbours might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes - that their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.

Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. About all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn't. From the prize-winning author of Strange Flowers and The Spinning Heart, The Queen of Dirt Island is an uplifting celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that bind generations together.

My Review: 

It was a very interesting and different kind of story. Especially the way it was written, with beautiful language that captures each of the character and their personalities, as well as actions, so well. I also really liked the short chapters that each portray one story, but together those chapters merge and make up this amazing life journey that each of the characters goes through. I loved the writing. However, the story itself, although started very strong, the ending was a bit disappointing.

The story follows four generations of Aylward women of Nenagh in Tipperary. It's about their life stories, filled with love, hate, anger, passion, peace, war, sins, forgiveness and desire. This book is about family, their connections and love, sometimes deep and sometimes not. It is a story about strong women, their strength, love, sacrifice and life with and without each other.

I loved the strong female characters in this book. Each of them was so well written, with strong personalities, voices and strengths. Their growth through the book was brilliantly written and explored.

Although I liked the short chapters and the story that they all merge into, some of them felt a bit unnecessary to the overall story. So as some of the characters that were explored. Apart from the main female characters, I couldn’t connect with any others, as they weren’t explored as much or just appeared for a little while, not giving enough time to get to know them. I much rather read more about the females in the story.

Overall: I liked the writing; it just flew and was so easy to get into the story. I loved the exploration of different generations of women, their strengths, growth, love…However, I was quite disappointed by the abrupt ending. 

About the Author:

Donal Ryan is the author of the novels The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December, the short-story collection A Slanting of the Sun, and the forthcoming novel All We Shall Know. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Limerick, and worked for the National Employment Rights Authority before the success of his first two novels allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6521880.Donal_Ryan