A very complicated and intense look at love, loss, relationships and how,far we will go to try to outrun grief. Not necessarily enjoyable but definitely thought provoking.

3.5★
“She enjoyed that she had pulled him away, but what was growing inside her was a feeling to dwarf all others; a sense of being too big for this s**t life. Too powerful. Too wild. Too good. If she were to tip her head back and roar, a thousand lions wouldn’t be louder.

. . . She knew it now. She was ascending, emerging fantastically into the world, like a phoenix. Her history was falling away and everything new awaited her.

. . . Her inner poetry was potent.”

That’s teen-aged Sissy, in London and high on Life (she likes to think). But her feelings have lately been enhanced by an assortment of goodies supplied by a current boyfriend/mentor/altogether-weird-dude.

Not long ago, Sissy’s dad died suddenly, leaving her mother (unmarried) devastated, and her father’s mother in just about as bad shape. Jude retires to bed until granny Anne breaks a wrist and moves in needing help. Jude rallies a bit, and Sissy feels pushed out.

Sissy’s two best mates are Rik (gay) and Cam (a sort-of-sometime boyfriend), and the threesome hang out as she skips classes and Cam skips work. Glasgow is increasingly unappealing, so they head to London to seek excitement.

Part of the action takes place in London and part back “home” with Jude and Anne. The extended family (Uncle Danny, cousins and others) come in and out of the story but don’t seem to add anything to it.

I found the characters interesting to begin with, but as they changed rather dramatically during the course of the novel, I lost interest. I realise that going over the grandmother’s marital circumstances added to the story, but she didn’t seem to be the same person (and not because of the circumstances, at least not to me).

Jude, Sissy’s mother, was the same. She seemed to change from tearfully dysfunctional to resilient and caring. But after Sissy left, Jude stayed, looking after Anne, her “mother-in-law” (it was often mentioned that she and Peter never married). And her boss at work was an older man who cared for her a little too much, making her very uncomfortable. This seemed an unnecessary distraction to the story.

“It was only when driving to work that Jude found space to think. Without understanding how, her life had become a series of carrying out services for other people.
. . .
Jude suddenly understood why Sissy had left, and with the arrival of this understanding she felt the awakening of a wildness, a primitive, urgent need to bring her daughter home and keep her close.”

I think every generation thinks it will be the Wildest of All in their family. (After all, what would The Olds know about sex or drugs or rock-and-roll?) Sissy wanted to escape the grief of losing her father by cutting loose in the Big City. Jude wanted to escape the unwed mother burden and the fact she had no family. Anne wanted to escape the life she'd chosen and stuck to for better or worse (mostly the latter).

Rik and Cam are necessary characters in Sissy's story, but Pascal and Fame seem to be sort of excuses to introduce a club-drug scene but aren't real people nor does she have any real connection with them. She just wipes herself out.

Anne, Jude, and Sissy are equally lost, for different reasons, and Lynch attempts to explain why and how they deal with it. I wasn’t crazy about the story, but I enjoyed her writing, if I can put it like that.. She has some great turns of phrase, and I loved this particular scene in a Glasgow park.

“Swings wrapped two and three times around their metal frame carried a double sadness; not only were they unusable and, no doubt, the source of disappointment to small children and tired parents, but they whispered of underwhelming weekends, days and nights of teenage wanderings, wild souls with nowhere to go, nowhere to be.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Legend Press for the review copy from which I’ve quoted.

3+ stars
A family becomes dysfunctional (or maybe they already were) as they try to find their way through their grief after the death of a loved one and for the most part do so alone. That was the saddest part of the story - that the characters had a long road finding their way back to each other and more importantly to themselves . Sad because by moving away from each other, they abandoned the means to help them heal.

"Peter Donnelly was not a celebrity or a politician. In fact, he was rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Even so, his sudden death was akin to a bomb going off in the Donnelly family, and all life after nothing more than a series of aftershocks, the effects of which would be felt far and wide for years to come"

The story is told from multiple perspectives- Anne, Peter's mother who tries to hang on through her Catholic Church, holding a secret that has broken her heart; Jude, his life partner and Sissy's mother, never having married, hiding guilt over something she almost did and the grief and sadness of her past with alcohol and pills; Sissy, Peter's seventeen year old daughter just doesn’t think she can function without her dad, runs from Glasgow to London and drugs and a rough lifestyle. While I was touched by these characters at the beginning and felt sorry for them in their grief, I became bored with them in the middle of the book. I was actually much more interested in Peter, the deceased father, son and lover of these women. Unfortunately we don't find our very much about him except that he was a loving father and an attorney turned musician . A somewhat predictable ending, but I admit that it was one I'd hoped for. Overall, it's a story I can say I liked, given that I found myself connected in the beginning and the end in spite of losing interest in the middle. I was interested enough to keep reading so 3+ stars .


I received an advanced copy of this book from Legend Times Group through NetGalley.

I am afraid this book was just average for me. It took me longer to read as it was a bit heavy going in parts. Just not for me . Sorry.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the chance to review this book.

I read a short sample from this book on a blog and felt I needed to read the full thing. Set in Glasgow and London, this is a good present day family drama charting the lives of Donnelly family members following a bereavement. The main characters are the women, Sissy, her granny Anne and mother Jude but there is a full cast of great characters here. As I was reading this I was thinking how many of their issues could have been solved by talking honestly to one another and at the same time acknowledging the same is true for most families (my own included). I was totally drawn in the the lives of the Donnellys and wasn’t quite ready to leave them and think there’s scope for a follow on book which I would definitely want to read.

Wow! This book was so good! The author's portrayal of the characters and their relationships really held my interest!