I have not had a more enjoyable reading recently. The initial impression was of a cool witty language that would dominate the experience of reading the book but it soon became more than a captivating exercise in style.
It won me over with the best description of a book launch that was at the same time funny, cruel, and realistic. It captured the pathetic and the sublime in this culminating moment of an author’s experience and the ridiculous anticlimax in the encounter with their first audience.
The book has an original plot – it follows the dynamics of a love triangle of sorts but it is the triangle of a girl and her three archetypal lovers: the Teacher, the Friend and the Lover. Thus it allows the author to dissect the nature of adolescent desire or love – the combination of the erotic appeal of the intellectual, the platonic homo-erotic intimacy with the confidante, and the purely sexual attraction to the elusive man. The main character Rachel struggles her way to maturity by gradually sorting out the nature of her attractions and setting herself free from the first two along the way. But in retrospect, the time of her entanglement and confusing affinities with the three men is the happiest time of her life when love is diffuse and all-consuming before it becomes tamed and is channeled to culminate in a marriage.
O’Donoghue is a master of detail and the ability to capture the undercurrents of a scene. The one-liners can be smart and witty and dirty but are also vehicles of an underlying melancholy, the melancholy of growing up and fitting in.
She has more literary substance than some bearers of literary awards.