August is a Wicked Month

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A week into her leave, a male friend she’s known for about a year drops by and kisses her in the garden. I am impressed with how well Edna O'Brien conveys emotional peaks and valleys, how she can expose the depths of loneliness, sadness and grief.

She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O'Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. The writing isn't up to O'Brien's usual high standard and I was left wondering what the message of the book was. The central character is so lost, that you ache for her while at the same time you'd like to slap her and tell her to get over it (though I can't honestly say my choices would have been any different). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. O'Brien really takes you inside Ellen's mind the entire time, and it is hard not to empathize with her feelings and situation and her deep deep loneliness.

Some readers might feel a sense of release in the honesty of this book; others might resent the needle pressed against the balloon.

But because I think the rest of the book is so exquisitely rendered, it really didn't diminish my enjoyment of the writing for long.Her 1960 debut novel, The Country Girl, was banned in her native Ireland for its groundbreaking depictions of female sexuality. The next John Banville book on the agenda is "Nightspawn", his debut novel published in 1971, which I will review the last weekend of February. Unfortunately for Ellen she finds herself attracted to the one guy who is not available and winds up sleeping with the oldest man in the group for a totally awful experience. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. This book filled me with an incredible sense of sadness, as in some ways I found myself in complete undersranding of ellen's emotions.