Maeve Flanagan grew up in a respectable south side Dublin suburb, the second of a large family of daughters. Her father was a primary school teacher, her mother a housewife who became converted to Womens' Lib. In her memoir, she looks back on the days of her growing up, the Sixties and Seventies in Ireland, a gentler time, perhaps, than today. The usual recollections are thumbed through: school, games, sexual awakening, clothes, books, television. The quiet glow of rose-coloured spectacles lies over the various remembrances, with a penumbra of sorrow in the final chapter when her father dies. One for those of us who yearn for a gentler time, and a less noisy one.