Helpful Score: 4
A. maz. ing. This is one of those books that I desperately want to discuss with someone in real life. I'm hoping I can get my book group to read it.
O'Donnell tells her story in three different voices, all residents of a housing project in Glasgow:
Marnie is crass, worldly, and wise beyond her 15 years.
Nelly, her 12-year-old sister, seems to be on the autism spectrum (although undiagnosed) and talks like the Queen of England.
Lennie, the girls' neighbor, is an elderly, homosexual mourning the loss of his lover.
Each voice is so distinct and so believable, that's it's very easy to navigate the frequent changes in narrator. It's also very easy to fall in love with these characters.
This novel could be YA, but only for teens whose parents aren't trying to shelter them from the darker side of the world: profanity, drug use, neglect, sex...especially between minors and adults. Because all of that is normal in Marnie's world. She's been responsible for herself and Nelly since she was five years old. She's always done what it takes to protect herself and her sister. Then her drug-addicted parents' both die, less than a year short of Marnie's 16th birthday, at which point Scottish law will apparently consider her an adult capable of caring for her younger sister. The girls know that if they don't keep their parents' deaths a secret from everyone, they'll end up the foster care system. Their secret becomes increasingly difficult to keep with drug-dealers looking for their father, and the grandfather who long ago abandoned his family looking for their mother.
The setting is grim, and yet there is love, joy and hope sprinkled through out. Their neighbor Lennie has been labeled as a sex-offender, and yet, he is the kindest, most loving person in the sisters' lives. Another supporting character with a shady past also plays a surprising role in the girls' lives, while their one living relative proves just as toxic as the parents who abandoned them repeatedly while alive, before finally abandoning them permanently. (view spoiler)
The only issue I had with the book was the pacing. The first part of the book is quite slow, setting up the characters' background, but also seeming to circle the same subject matter again and again. Then suddenly the plot picks up steam and things start happening. But the end, events are flying by at top speed and several coincidences grease the wheels a little too conveniently. (I have no idea where all those train metaphors just came from.) However, I grew to love these characters so much that I happily went along for the ride.
O'Donnell tells her story in three different voices, all residents of a housing project in Glasgow:
Marnie is crass, worldly, and wise beyond her 15 years.
Nelly, her 12-year-old sister, seems to be on the autism spectrum (although undiagnosed) and talks like the Queen of England.
Lennie, the girls' neighbor, is an elderly, homosexual mourning the loss of his lover.
Each voice is so distinct and so believable, that's it's very easy to navigate the frequent changes in narrator. It's also very easy to fall in love with these characters.
This novel could be YA, but only for teens whose parents aren't trying to shelter them from the darker side of the world: profanity, drug use, neglect, sex...especially between minors and adults. Because all of that is normal in Marnie's world. She's been responsible for herself and Nelly since she was five years old. She's always done what it takes to protect herself and her sister. Then her drug-addicted parents' both die, less than a year short of Marnie's 16th birthday, at which point Scottish law will apparently consider her an adult capable of caring for her younger sister. The girls know that if they don't keep their parents' deaths a secret from everyone, they'll end up the foster care system. Their secret becomes increasingly difficult to keep with drug-dealers looking for their father, and the grandfather who long ago abandoned his family looking for their mother.
The setting is grim, and yet there is love, joy and hope sprinkled through out. Their neighbor Lennie has been labeled as a sex-offender, and yet, he is the kindest, most loving person in the sisters' lives. Another supporting character with a shady past also plays a surprising role in the girls' lives, while their one living relative proves just as toxic as the parents who abandoned them repeatedly while alive, before finally abandoning them permanently. (view spoiler)
The only issue I had with the book was the pacing. The first part of the book is quite slow, setting up the characters' background, but also seeming to circle the same subject matter again and again. Then suddenly the plot picks up steam and things start happening. But the end, events are flying by at top speed and several coincidences grease the wheels a little too conveniently. (I have no idea where all those train metaphors just came from.) However, I grew to love these characters so much that I happily went along for the ride.
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