Caitriona Lally

Caitriona Lally has assumed a place among my favorite authors. Her debut novel, Eggshells, hooked me with an honest portrayal of a high functioning mentally ill person coping with life. Wunderland hooked me with her excellent description of life in the caretaker role.

What a powerful novel. Life in the caretaker role does not always progress or end well and Ms. Lally's novel so brilliantly reminds us. Most of all, Wunderland reminded me that the line between caretaker and "patient" is never all that clean.

I highly recommend both of Ms. Lally's excellent novels.… (more)

Irish fiction (character novel in which quirky, lonely Vivian wanders the streets of Dublin looking for a portal to an alternate universe where she might belong). This was refreshing and funny, but I got tired of reading about her wandering journeys after the first 10 chapters or so (she has funny adventures, but rarely makes any progress). Maybe it could have just 9 chapters of her wandering the streets instead of 18? I eventually lost patience and skipped ahead (*spoiler alert*) to find that she does at least find a loyal kind of friend in "Penelope."… (more)

I just finished Eggshells by Caitriona Lally which won the Rooney Prize for "an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under forty years of age" in 2018. I have to say, when I first started reading this book I wondered what kind of idiot would award it a prize of any sort. If you like lists of anything you can think of, this is the book for you. This is a stream of consciousness novel about Vivian who considers herself a changling and spends her days trying to find a portal to send her back to where she belongs. I think she's autistic and she is alone in a home left her by her aunt. I think she lives "on the dole" because she does have a social service worker who keeps urging her to look for jobs. By alone, I mean this woman is able to live her life exactly as she wants, but she has no one to help her figure out how that should be. However, this is better than it could be - once she had parents who put her in a fire, changling that she is, to send her to her own country and get their real daughter back. So far, alone is better than that. She does have a sister, also named Vivian, who finds her quite distasteful. She also finds herself distasteful, evidently, because she will not look in a mirror; however, her very strong body odor is comforting to her. She will very occasionally bathe or wash her hair, but she prefers the way she smells without doing so. She writes up an ad for a friend and puts it on a tree, voila, she gets one as smelly and disoriented as she. She likes having a friend, within limits. She needs lots of alone time. Her behaviors in a 6-year-old would seem cute and precocious, but she's a gray-haired woman. It's a pretty short book, worth reading just for the novelty.… (more)