Welcome to Litsy!

A dark story about the dead ends of life. Two characters kidnap a teen boy to force his brother to pay a drug dealing debt, stashing him at their loner cousin‘s house. The cousin is a young man who experiences depression and anxiety and is grieving the loss of his mother. The boy‘s girlfriend just wants to escape the town. It‘s a story that doesn‘t offer easy resolutions but brilliantly illustrates the dead ends in some communities.

Whelp
I‘ve some reading to do 🤭👀

This was great. One of the better Women Prize books this year. The story of a troubled family slowly unravels. Each person is interesting and tortured in their own way. At the heart of the story is a horrible something, and a terrible reporter. The writing is solid and the book is heavy but intriguing.

“If you had the bad luck to be from Ireland, it felt, you had to suck it up and never have sex or else have the baby.”

You could also include 21 states in the U.S. where this now applies as well.

I‘m sitting at Safelite getting a new windshield with a bunch of very quiet people. Thankfully they don‘t have a tv on. Suddenly I noticed that both my book and my sweatshirt have the same logo. A bit of overkill? If I‘m lucky the folks will think I work at Galaxy. 😊

Oh Sailor, I thought, the little size of you. This is what it feels like when everything goes wrong, and by your own hand. When you are caught, cornered, the one to blame, when you discover something in your nature that you did not know was there and which you do not like. Confusion, shame, resentment, regret: it's my area. Don't panic. Sit tight. I can help you with this.

'Hello,' I replied but didn't know what to add nor how to pitch it because she was three and I hadn't gotten to that page in childrearing yet. 'We're not supposed to praise little girls for their looks any more,' I told my friend, 'but for their brains, and my God but your daughter is clever. Such clever hair, such clever eyes.' She really was a beauty, that child.

'Gets it from her mother, obviously.'

I ducked around a corner. Look, Mama's going round the bend! I wanted to tell you, but oh, oh. What struck me as the starkest contradiction of all was that, having navigated this much of life the volatility of youth, of love and loss, the agony and the ecstasy - the closest I had come to losing my mind was during the period known as settling down.

I had listened to him on the other side of that door snoring away in the box room, those snug, contented snores I used to find endearing, the two of us tucked up together in the same bed on a cold night, except we were no longer in the same room. And soon we would no longer be under the same roof, nor even under the same stars. I could not get my head around it: how could my husband sleep under the circumstances?

A young girl is suspected of killing a younger child and an opportunistic journalist tries to gain information about the tragedy from her family. As he pries and cajoles we are given glimpses into their lives and realize there is was a string of everyday tragedies leading to the present day one. A well executed but bleak rumination.