In rainy County Clare, a teenage girl with a life-threatening illness lies in her attic bedroom, surrounded by nearly four thousand books, and tells the story of her family.
I feel like this premise is comparable to vanilla ice-cream*: it’s so simple that you want to either execute it flawlessly or not bother at all. For my money, what Niall Williams has created here is pretty close to flawless. The trick of it was to anchor what is, after all, a pretty miserable story in the character of the protagonist, Ruth, whose narrative voice is somehow both warm and ironic, self-aware without being self-pitying. What results is an engaging and open-hearted novel, written passionately but not forcefully; a meditation on storytelling and Irish identity.
*You may not agree with my views about books. That’s fine; not everyone has the same taste. You should, however, trust me when it comes to matters of ice-cream. I have a lot of experience.