- Author: Brendan O'Carroll
- Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Newport, Ky.
- Why I bought this book: It's not easy finding contemporary Irish fiction. When I do, I buy it.
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This is a quintessential Irish book: About family and church and schooling and sex, it's laugh-out-loud hysterical, and melancholy.
Those familiar with growing up in an Irish Catholic home any time within the past 100 years or so will find themselves recognizing the mothers and fathers and priests and nuns. You'll smile, break into wide grins, or laugh as you read and the tears stream down your cheeks.
The story about the preparation for one's First Confession, delivered by Sister Concepta Pius of the Blessed Heart Girls National School and punctuated by Marion Delany's questions -- she always has questions -- is worth the price of admission. So is the description of the school's sex education lecture, which served its purpose by leaving the girls "half informed and completely terrified."
The book explores the childhood and teenage years of Agnes Reddin, who later became Agnes Brown. In other books by O'Carroll, she is a wife, a mammy and a granny, but this it the story of her days before she became all that.
Agnes and Marion are best of friends, trying to survive in the working-class ghetto of the Jarro when church and state in Ireland were, like a twin Jesus, always watching and judging. It tells about Agnes' family -- her father Basco, a factory worker and trade union man inspired by the real-life James Larkin, her mother Connie, daughter of the factory owner who was disowned and disinherited after marrying a working man, and younger sister Dolly, who lives to break the rules.
But the heart and of the story is whether Agnes will wear a white dress at her wedding, against all the rules, when everyone in Dublin knows she cannot because she's not a virgin.
The writing here is wonderful and like the novel: Short, simple, direct, and funny. It's tenderhearted and kind.
It's well worth your time.
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