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BOOK REVIEW By Esther Haller-ClarkeÌý

You Me and Other People by Fionnuala KearneyÌý

This novel is the debut for writer Fionnuala Kearney and not a bad one at that. At the beginning I thought ‘Harper Collins, what a stroke of luck’, by the end I had no choice but to recognise that talent was the key to this relationship, not luck.Ìý

You Me and Other People starts off a little slow if I’m honest and I did wonder if I was embarking on the dreaded genre of Chic lit, but I have to say I became pretty attached to the characters and the writing lent itself to a particularly busy week when I had to juggle reading with travelling, working and mothering!Ìý

The basic premise of the story is the failing of a marriage, the lies that brought it to that stage and how one lie begets another. Set in good old London town (although I kept for some reason imagining the characters to be American), there are nice notes of familiarity and a nod to the busy competitive pace of modern day life. The mother daughter relationships were very believable and I liked that we saw a real case of swings, roundabouts and bumps in the road.ÌýÌý

The writing style is simple, it’s not hard to understand and nor is the novel embellished with overly flamboyant literary blurb. It is however very much a case of less is more, there is space in the novel and I am a fan of space.Ìý

The slow revealing of the characters and their stories was very clever. It would have been so easy to fill the book with emotive descriptions just to pull at the heart strings, to assist us in siding with one character more than the other, but cleverly Fionnuala Kearney simply hinted at the characters emotional complexities as she disregarded their protective layering page by page - leaving us the reader room to decide for ourselves how much we believed them, how much we liked them and of course if we had sympathy for them or not.Ìý

Yes at times it was hard to really put myself in the place of a successful songwriter who paints her rage onto a wall (but I’ll be honest I do think ‘what a good, if not expensive to repair’ idea). Initially I thought her husband was an irritating wimp who needed a good swift kick, but I got to understand him and his for want of a better word his ‘motivations’. And here’s the soppy bit, probably most special about this book was the thread of compassion, understanding and forgiveness that runs through it from the characters to each other – if all marriages ended in such a ‘healthy way’ we’d be a much happier bunch…

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