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Sylvia Larkin is someone I’d find infuriating to know and toxic to love. She’s a detached mother to 11-year-old Kate and an even more detached wife to the eternally patient JP. Prickly and stand-offish, she feels both inferior and superior to the other mothers who congregate around her daughter’s school. When a former lover holds a show at a Dublin art gallery, it takes Sylvia a nanosecond to start mooning about him and her own abandoned dreams of life as an artist. Yet this book is so well crafted that, despite myself, I cared about Sylvia and the slowly disclosed traumas that lie behind her antics. Grehan, who lives in Waterford, is an astute observer whose descriptions made me tingle with recognition. At an excruciating school get-together, Sylvia silently skewers the other mums: “They visit each other’s houses for raucous pots of tea in the afternoons during which they discuss their husbands’ body parts.” This lucid and intelligent novel is Grehan’s first. I look forward to reading her future work.
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