Mary > Recent Status Updates

Getting better

“The internet women are forever having epiphanies: nine times out of ten it’s about making courgette spaghetti or tucking your shirt into your knickers so it’s still hanging out at the back. They make videos about it!”
Love how magical realism debunks fake ‘on-line’ magic here 🤣

“He missed,” says Sandra, thankfully.
“But the scooped-out bit became Lough Neagh,” says Marion, “and the part he flung at the other giant landed in the sea. Nowadays we call it the Isle of Man.” Marion ta-das with her hands.
“Finn McCool was shite at aiming,” says Alex.

Finn McCool’s barney with a Scottish giant… he built a causeway thro’ the sea so he could schedule a fight. This didn’t work for obvious reasons: the sea was deep and Finn ran out of weirdly shaped rocks. In frustration, he reached into the middle of Ulster and scooped up a big lump of muck. He flung this clod at the Scottish giant.

Chapter 21 and getting better; touching relationship developing between crusty old Gracie and young Luca.

Some of characters seem like over- cooked caricatures!

I'm really enjoying the writer’s lilting accent and just how rich the Antrim dialect is.

Robert-John would have a conniption if he knew there was a mobile on Small

An honour killing? If so, who is culpable? Just the adult family members or the extended Afghan community who refuse to relinquish an age-old belief system: that a family‘s name is inextricably linked with the ‘virtue’ of its female members.

So far, so good. I like the characters and am optimistic that Fi and Mason will navigate the transplant process successfully.

“They were all themselves, living in their own minds, just as Stephen now was living in his and dreading its own extinction, the great change beyond imagining, which nobody knew about for sure, no matter how strong their faith was, no matter how hard they prayed.”

While Maurice’s family waits collectively for "The News," they are trapped in their own individual prisons of fear.