Book of the week
Blurting out a series of harsh home truths in the middle of a family dinner party is sure to spice up the action, making a tantalising start to Marian Keyes’ 14th novel.
Cara Casey’s recent concussion – from a shop sign landing on her head – leaves her incapable of keeping secrets any longer as guests skirt around family issues at her sister-in-law Jessie’s posh multi-course meal.
However, the consequences of her revelations have to wait, because right after this titillating dinner party prologue, we’re taken back to six months earlier, and given a slow build-up and background to all the revelations.
Cara, well respected at the highclass Dublin hotel where she’s head receptionist, checks in even the rudest guests with no problem at all, swallowing the insults, then compensating by swallowing bucketloads of chocolate on the sly and making herself throw it up again.
Jessie, married to Casey’s husband Ed’s brother, has her own massive insecurities, assuaged by
funding ever more lavish family events – even funding large numbers of family members to travel to Italy, so she can feel the friendship and love she missed as a teenager.
Her husband Johnny, once a philanderer, seems to have settled down but Jessie isn’t sure she can still trust him, even though he’s her invaluable sidekick in their joint cookery supply business.
The third brother, Liam, is a churl, and nobody can understand why the lovely, unassuming Nell married him. Like pretty much everyone else in the book, in one way or another, he needs to grow up.
Then there are Ed’s and Johnny’s children, and assorted friends and relations – so many characters, in fact, that the family trees at the start of Grown Ups become essential.
As we’ve come to expect from Marian Keyes, there is a lot of witty dialogue, occasional glamour, and a lot of grit as her characters face down some big issues.
The subject of addiction to drugs was tackled with tremendous insight in her third novel, Rachel’s Holiday, and this time, in Grown Ups, the addiction is bulimia.
Cara thinks her compulsion to stuff herself with high-calorie food then puke it up straight away is her own guilty secret, that no one else knows. But Ed is beginning to realise that she’s addicted to overeating. However, he reasons with himself, he doesn’t want to shame her: she’s not grossly thin or obese, and he thinks she’ll snap out
of it. He fails to intervene and it’s only when she has a lifethreatening seizure he sees his enabling role has to stop. Whether Cara can stop, though, remains a question.
Once again, Marian Keyes is at the top of her craft, weaving intricate family relationships and the secrets and lies within, and developing a range of complex, believable characters that make us want to keep turning the page, but not wanting it to ever end.
There is a mile of backstory to each character, but without it, the compelling read would be all the shorter – and poorer – for it.
– Felicity Price
There is a lot of witty dialogue, occasional glamour, and grit as her characters face down some big issues.