It took me a little while to get into this but I was soon drawn in and fell in love with the character of Mary. A great account of the Troubles and how it affected those living there at the time. Mary's story was beautiful and the descriptions of how life was for young girls in Northern Ireland at the time was great. I really, really enjoyed it. Definitely recommended.

Really enjoyed this book and all the characters. I would love to Rea more by this author as I found it so beautiful. Thank you to netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into crime/thriller books and even psychological thrillers too so I am extremely pleased and grateful to them for opening up my mind to something totally different.

I enjoyed this very much. 4 stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Tish Delaney's debut is intrinsically Irish and a strongly character driven read set amidst the backdrop of the Northern Ireland troubles, the religious divisions, the horrors of the bombs and the bullets, and the inevitable impact it had on the lives of individuals. The hold the Catholic church had at that time and the harsh, oppressive social norms and attitudes of the period feel as they come from an era long ago, given how things have changed since. Mary grows up with a ghastly nightmare of a selfish, self absorbed, poisonous mother chipping away at any sense of self esteem she might have developed, the largely silent presence of her father and her best friend, Lizzie Magee. She is bright and her every dream is of getting out her family home, as her siblings have done, and making her way to the US, the land of happy ever after. All her plans go disastrously awry and her life shattered when at the tender age of 16 she finds herself pregnant.

Her mother forces Mary into a shotgun marriage with a local farmer, John, who lives with his mother. She becomes a farmer's wife, and in the next 25 years goes on to have 5 children, and a strangely weird relationship with John that is characterised by a strong physical, heavily sexually active relations behind closed doors in the bedroom and one of an estranged silence between the two of them in every sphere of life elsewhere, despite the their close proximity to each other. In a emotionally charged and heartbreaking narrative, Mary lives through the years as a traumatised woman, growing up in many areas, yet so understandably emotionally stunted in others. It would be all too easy to superficially attribute her feelings towards John as those of hate, things are so much more complicated and can she actually face the truth of what lies between them?

One of the major highlights of this novel for me was Delaney's use of the vernacular and her beautiful prose, it made reading this a joy, although I wish John's personal history was revealed a little earlier in the story. Some readers might find the nature of the relationship between Mary and John hard to come to terms with and comprehend, but these were different times. This was a brilliant and compulsive Irish read, a coming of age, of a marriage, family, and emotional trauma that I recommend to those who love Irish novels and complex character driven books. Many thanks to Random House Cornerstone for an ARC.

I found this book really sad in parts, loved reading it, and read it quickly as i couldnt put it down.
It shows how our hopes and dreams when we are young can change and turn bad....
Great read,

I have mixed feelings about this lovely lovely book.
Thé main character mary had such a good voice and it was heartbreaking at times. However the relationship between John and Mary was unbelievable at moments and rather frustrating.
I fully recommend this moving book.

This book was a bit of a curate's egg for me. The first part dealing with Mary's childhood before her forced marriage at sixteen was superb. It really captured growing up with a toxic, narcissistic mother in Northern Ireland and resonated so much with my own life down to her mother spelling out regpungant words (to her) such as T.R.A.M.P and the superior holier than thou attitude, belittling and sense of never being good enough or of getting things right. It started to fall apart for me when Mary gets pregnant after her first sexual encounter (how predictable) and is hastly married off to the farmer down the road who is the rumoured who has recently returned heartbroken from that there London (and is himself the rumoured illigetimate offspring of a priest).

The couple never speak to each other and it is not explained until near the end of the book why he agreed to marry Mary (although it is easy to guess, if not the most logical or realistic thing to do). They go onto to have five children, have a torrid but closeted in the bedroom sex life and despite working together on the farm never speak to one another and seem to show no kindness to each other either, which I just couldn't quite believe. They get married in 1982,I do know that many young people still had "shotgun" marriages at that point in time in Northern Ireland but don't know of anyone who married someone not the father of the child. At that point I was openly living with my boyfriend, all be it in the city as were many friends. Things weren't quite as oppressive sexually as made out, the book should have been set in the 60's or 70's if it wanted to have the sexual mores it recounts. Many girls crossed the water for an abortion in Scotland or England (as they still have to), often their parents were the most religious and most vocally against abortion in public, but this is never considered as an option for Mary.

I got really frustrated and frankly bored with Mary and John's distancing shenanigans and the saintly matriarch, Birdie who never seemed to consider knocking their heads together and spilling the beans on the reasons behind the set up. I felt that Mary was likely suffering from CPTSD and really needed some counselling and help which older, wiser people in the book just did not acknowledge. Towards the end of the book, some really random events occur. One of these involves Mary's teenage sweetheart and is just totally unnecessary and unlikely as are the repercussions on Mary's best friend's life of trying to follow in Mary's footsteps. The book just goes on too long and Mary and John's misunderstandings and micro agressions towards each other become repetitive and the narrative a bit messy. I think a bit of editing of the latter parts would have helped the narrative be more dynamic.

However, when all is said I think there was some incredible and incisive writing in this book. It's great to hear the Northern Irish venacular being used in written text. I think the backdrop of the troubles and horrendous events occuring was used well to punctuate the story. I'm glad I read the book. It's flawed but still a really interesting read.

There are some very good things about this book. The narrative voice is strong and often humorous. The characterisation is excellent and the setting against the backdrop of The Troubles in Northern Ireland is superbly portrayed.

I have to say, though, that I found the main characters - Mary and John - extremely irritating at times. I felt like banging their heads together. Now, I don't know if this was intentional - it certainly involves the reader. However, there is a great danger that it may lose the reader as well. There were times when I considered giving up out of annoyance but the writing was so strong and the book overall so compelling, that I was forced to continue.

Pregnant at sixteen, Mary - a clever girl about to embark on her A levels - falls pregnant. The father is unaware of the situation and out of the picture, so Mary's horrendous mother marries her off to the boy next door. Well, to the young man running the farm down the road. Mary spends the next 25 years resenting this, despite producing several more legitimate children.

The relationship between Mary and her husband is strained everywhere except in the bedroom. They barely speak and have no real idea how the other party feels. While I can get my head around the idea of a loveless marriage, the idea of two people who enjoy each other physically never making it beyond being strangers over the course of a quarter century just doesn't ring true. I think maybe it was meant to be symbolic of the struggle for peace in NI - talks certainly broke down often enough.

Also, there is a scene towards the end involving a former boyfriend, which seemed to me entirely pointless. I won't go into details but for a man of 40 to still be miffed because his teenage girlfriend did the dirty on him is utterly bizarre. I found his actions, and Mary's weak response, to be barely credible.

Nevertheless, this is a great read (mostly) for the characters and the voice. I'm glad to have read it.

I loved Before My Actual Heat Breaks. Mary is the main character and her voice is so strong I felt she was talking directly to me.

Set in Northern Ireland Mary grows up well aware of the Troubles in the Province, but her own personal troubles are nearer home in the person of her mother who belittles her at every opportunity and a father who she loves but who stands by silently.

When Mary is 16 she goes on a school trip and her life takes an unexpected and drastic turn. As a result, all her dreams of escaping to America are wrecked as she is married to local farmer, John Johns, and goes to live with him and his mother, Bridie. All the characters, from mother Sadie to Mary's immediate family and kind Bridie are well written and life as a farmer's wife is believable.

Before My Actual Heart Breaks is a story of love, family and, at its heart, miscommunication and secrets. It's an easier read than Milkman, set in the same era. It made me think of Gone With the Wind in its intensity around the love story but its essential Irishness will appeal to readers of Anne Griffin's When All Is Said. Highly recommend it. Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin/Random House for the opportunity to read and review it.

First of all, thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK Cornerstone for sharing an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

It took me a while to get into this book. Some of it was the slog through the local dialect which was hard to understand at times. I'm not complaining of it, but it did take some time to get used to it. The beginning chapters also had a lot of characters to get to know. Once I got into it properly it became a lot easier and it kind of sucked me into that world.

Mary Rattagan is the youngest of a large Catholic family in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles" that dominated the last decades of the 20th century there. She has an abusive mother and a passive father. We visit at a few periods of her childhood and then the story is focused on her teens when her life plans got upended and the idea of escape from the hellish place was no longer possible. At sixteen a marriage is arranged for her with neighbor John Johns. She has no say in the matter and circumstances dictate that she simply accepts it and gets on with life. She goes on to have five children but their relationship is truly a strange one. They are at odds from early on and I guess what happens is neither is able to take steps to communicate with the other. It's like two strangers sharing a lifetime.

All the while, the horrors of Northern Ireland continue to take place, mostly as a backdrop. But the influence of that backdrop is massive and, at least for our main character, is a major influence on her ability to "grow up". The main part of the story covers the twenty five years of them being married and how some things changed with times while others didn't. While there is some personal growth involved, it doesn't always instigate changes in behavior. This was incredibly frustrating, especially towards the end when you wonder how people can exist as they have. It's a truly bizarre situation..

I will say this was very much a page-turner once I got going and it was only at the end I found it hard to get through. I think that had much more to do with frustrations with the main characters. It almost came to despair and even a the end I wonder about them.

Overall this was a pretty good read, and the atmosphere of the location and time period is excellent. There's also a good representation of the culture of "good" Catholics and so on. Overall I give this 3.5 stars.

This feels to me like an 'also ran' in comparison with Milkman - the female narrative voice, the Northern Ireland setting at least partly during the 'Troubles', the conflict between Catholic mother and daughter, the extended family... and that over-familiar situation that isn't treated with enough originality to avoid it feeling tired.

I found it disconcerting that the narrative voice jumps around in time, in one sentence looking back on her past from the future, in the next speaking with a child's voice. There's something a bit flat about the writing, as if it's not quite hitting the mark in every tone, and it never drew me in enough for me to engage emotionally. Oddly lacking in energy, I found myself quickly flagging with this one, I'm afraid.