✨Ellen📍SF,CA 🌉✨

.
🎉Happy Pub Day!🎉

[Stations edition]

Auto-buy author Louise Kennedy has gutted me, but I should have known. Her debut novel Trespasses is brilliant, the writing sublime. I loved it, but it also crushed me.

I hoped for a repeat performance. For me, though, Stations--heartfelt, heartwrenching, written in spare gorgeous prose, filled with honesty & pathos that never flinches or sentimentalizes--actually outshone Trespasses. Thank you for my eARC @bloomsburypublishing !

Ireland must be in my literary hardwiring, because I seem to have a pronounced threshold for reading pain. A large part of Stations entails trauma & dysfunction--addiction, alcoholism, abuse, poverty, depression, estrangement, self-destruction. So much raw sadness as to be almost intolerable. Fortunately, the counterbalance to all the sorrow is powerful: exceptional storytelling, flashes of humor, rich characterization, a vivid sense of place & time--London, Ireland, the 80s.

The investment I had in these characters! Rebellious Róisín, the darkly funny, smart, self-loathing heart of this novel, is not unlike Cushla, from Trespasses. And charismatic Red, who befriends Ro as a teen, is a powerful presence, lingering long after he is physically gone from her life. Kennedy paints a beautiful portrait of their connection, impossible to look away from. I adored their banter, but the terrible toll that secrets & shame can have on a person is a powerful undercurrent in both.

The novel leaps unevenly through time for a quarter-century of Ro's life, an often-devastating journey into adulthood. Kennedy's gift for immersive atmosphere & compassionate portrayal of human struggle through it all is uncanny. Róisín's every vulnerable step as she makes her life choices felt like my own. And despite her angsty demons, her barbed wit had me laughing out loud many times. Thankful for that!

And for the fact that we are left with some tenderness, gifted the chance to clearly see Ro into middle age and understand her without judgment. She lands with some regrets about her past, but also with lessons learned, wisdom accrued, lovely people who care deeply for her. A beautiful work in progress, like all of us!