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leah_flies_high's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
margiebentley's review against another edition
3.0
Finished this today, it is readable but I am not fussy about her disjointed writing style. The characters were a challenge to love at times also;)
babymandrake_666's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
kemmer's review against another edition
4.0
I was only going to give it three stars, but I keep thinking about the characters and how well she gives one a sense of place. In this case, more than one place -- Ireland, New York in the '90's, Mali, etc.
oscard99's review against another edition
3.0
Rosaleen was all kinds of messy for no damn reason and yet she was ALWAYS the moment!
motherofladybirds's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
rnevillekett's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
bookherd's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This family drama concerns the Madigans, a 21st centurt Irish family whose four children are coming home from far flung places to visit their mother, Rosaleen, for Christmas. Rosaleen has hinted that she is going to sell the house they all grew up in, so there is some consternation among the siblings, Dan, Emmet, Constance, and Hanna. We get to see the siblings as children together, and then individually as adults, before we see them back together as a family. We see their weaknesses and faults, their attempts to manage their relationships with their mother and siblings, and where the family rifts are. Rosaleen is a formidable character herself, with the power to raise storms within her family and then quiet them. If you like complex family relationships, this is a great book for you.
natalie_zander's review against another edition
3.0
is there a single decent family in all of ireland?
siria's review against another edition
1.75
There's a certain type of movie that gets referred to as Oscar bait—a film that panders to ideas of what a good movie "looks" like, with lavish period costuming or a depressing but unchallenging treatment of some important issue or a beautiful actor who is bold enough to wear a prosthetic or gain 5kg for a role. The Green Road felt like Booker bait.
I went back and looked at some of the mainstream reviews for this book when it was first published. The Irish Times called it "Irish, or rather Irish-novelly, [in] an unashamed fashion", but is so in order to play with technique and sensibility; the Guardian opined that Enright was "playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do", that she "[treads] that line of Irish literary cliche with delicious knowingness."
Enright might be aware that she's working with clichés, but I have to disagree with those reviewers that she does so well. There's no subversion here, nor even the deftness of touch that could breathe fresh life into the emotionally repressed Irish Catholic family pre- and mid-Celtic Tiger. The main characters all have one defining feature—the Narcissist Mother, the Gay Son, the Self-Righteous Son, the Alcoholic Daughter, the Fat Daughter—and tend to (re)act like Literary Characters, not people. This sits oddly alongside Enright's clear insistence on realism in things like the big Christmas Day fight, where half the dialogue are the kinds of non sequiturs you get when what people are really fighting about is things that have been festering for twenty years that they might not even have articulated to themselves. That disjointedness is apparent elsewhere in the book. When Enright is writing about what she knows, she's capable of passages of startling perceptiveness: her description of the behaviour on Christmas Eve in a rural pub in the boom years was spot on, ditto her account of an Irish supermarket on the same day. But as soon as she's outside of personal experience—the chapter set in the NYC gay community of ca. 1990, the chapter set in Mali in ca. 2005—it's at best stagey and mostly distasteful.
It all felt a bit cynical to me but hey, it won Enright awards, so I guess she knows what she's doing.
I went back and looked at some of the mainstream reviews for this book when it was first published. The Irish Times called it "Irish, or rather Irish-novelly, [in] an unashamed fashion", but is so in order to play with technique and sensibility; the Guardian opined that Enright was "playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do", that she "[treads] that line of Irish literary cliche with delicious knowingness."
Enright might be aware that she's working with clichés, but I have to disagree with those reviewers that she does so well. There's no subversion here, nor even the deftness of touch that could breathe fresh life into the emotionally repressed Irish Catholic family pre- and mid-Celtic Tiger. The main characters all have one defining feature—the Narcissist Mother, the Gay Son, the Self-Righteous Son, the Alcoholic Daughter, the Fat Daughter—and tend to (re)act like Literary Characters, not people. This sits oddly alongside Enright's clear insistence on realism in things like the big Christmas Day fight, where half the dialogue are the kinds of non sequiturs you get when what people are really fighting about is things that have been festering for twenty years that they might not even have articulated to themselves. That disjointedness is apparent elsewhere in the book. When Enright is writing about what she knows, she's capable of passages of startling perceptiveness: her description of the behaviour on Christmas Eve in a rural pub in the boom years was spot on, ditto her account of an Irish supermarket on the same day. But as soon as she's outside of personal experience—the chapter set in the NYC gay community of ca. 1990, the chapter set in Mali in ca. 2005—it's at best stagey and mostly distasteful.
It all felt a bit cynical to me but hey, it won Enright awards, so I guess she knows what she's doing.