FEBRUARY’S BOOK OF THE MONTH
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Each letter published receives a book pack from the Weekly. Send your feedback on next month’s book, Grown Ups, to win!
I’m a huge Marian Keyes fan. For me, her novels strike the perfect balance between dark and light.
Yes, she’s hit on a formula − usually there’s a large Irish family, always lots of humour mixed with a weighty theme such as addiction, and relationships tend to go wrong before eventually being resolved. But it’s a formula that works and Grown Ups – which has all of these elements and more – is a cracker of a read.
The large family here is the Casey clan − three brothers, Liam, Johnny and Ed, plus their wives and children. On the face of it they seem to have a great time whenever they gather.
And they are always catching up for weekends in luxury hotels, holidays abroad and fancy dinners – mostly funded by Johnny’s wife Jessie, who is a successful businesswoman and compulsively generous.
However, beneath the façade of a happy family, things are going wrong.
Liam is a ratbag and his younger wife Nell has no idea what she’s got herself into. Johnny and Jessie’s life is not as carefree as it seems, while Ed’s wife Cara is struggling with a secret food addiction, and her bingeing and purging threatens not only her health but her sanity.
Through the course of this novel every relationship becomes strained, and each of the brothers’ wives have to redesign their life.
There are loads of characters involved and all of them have detailed life histories. There is also a thread dealing with the way asylum seekers are treated in Ireland, plus an exploration of the way millennials think.
In the hands of a less skilled writer it could all have become hopelessly confusing. But somehow Marian manages to grab her readers, deposit us in the middle of this big, messy, noisy family and make us feel like we belong there.
Some people will dismiss Grown Ups as chick lit and not worthy of being a book club pick. But just because it’s an entertaining, warm-hearted read doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile one, and there is heaps going on in its 600-plus pages to provoke thought and spark a discussion.