Wednesday, December 7, 2016

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney


29963490
5 Stars

Welcome to Cork – a quaint little nothing of a town in Ireland ran by local mob boss Jimmy. Cork is also where Jimmy’s birth mother Maureen lives and she’s just had an . . . uhhhhhh unfortunate interaction with an intruder. Luckily Jimmy is a problem-solver and calls on a favor of local drunk Tony. Tony gets more than he bargained for when the “favor” ends up being not only body disposal, but also a body he recognized – fellow boozer and pimp Robbie. All goes smoothly until Robbie’s girlfriend/“employee”/dope fiend comes sniffing around Maureen’s place (which used to be the brothel) hoping someone has seen Robbie because he was her drug connection. Which brings us to our last main character Ryan – Tony’s 15 year old son who happens to be a real up-and-comer in the drug trade. Find out what happens when all of these worlds collide on the next episode of . . . .



Are any of you even old enough to remember Soap???? Probably not. You’ll just have to trust that my little blurb above combined with that joke is fecking brilliant ; )

Edward Lorn gets 100% of the credit for me reading this. Even though it had a title that made me go hmmmmmm and a cover that made the reformed Catholic in me want to jump all over, I just didn’t think it would be worth climbing over Mount Library Book anytime soon. Man am I glad I have someone like Ed in my life. We don’t always agree on books, but when I see him really crapping his pants over something I try to pay attention. Especially when he’s ballsy enough to name drop an author like Caroline Kepnes in his review. Normally I hate when books or authors are compared to others, but it’s only because the people who make the comparisons appear to be inbred illiterate hillbillies who think everything is “the next Gone Girl”. That being said, I’m going to make my own comparison: If The Goldfinch was one of your top reads, The Glorious Heresies might be the book for you. Bonus is that it only contains half the pages!

Easy E is spot on in his assessment of Lisa McInerney’s ability to develop this ensemble cast – let alone tackling the task of taking a young man through his oh-so-very-unpleasant coming of age. Simply remarkable. As much guff as is presented on the interwebs that “men and women are the same and writers should be able to write the opposite sex” that is simply not true. McInerney has, indeed, done what Kepnes and Tartt have done in the past with these male characters and she should be praised for it. She also should be praised for my current state . . . .



This is hands down the best book I’ve read this year. You heard me right, it’s getting top honors when I do my yearly wrap-up. It’d be great if I had some real doozies for quotes I could share in order to show you how brilliant this was, but even though I have a shitton of highlights on my Kindle, they all amount to things like this . . . .

“You don’t know your own strength till you need it.”

“How do you build a life from bones?”

“There was something beautiful here once.”

“Nothing cleansing as fire.”


As you can see, none of the above means diddly squat unless you read the book. Sooooooo, in order to prove just how serious I am about this being as good as I think it is I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m recommending it to Ron 2.0. For the first time ever I think I’ve found something that can pass his ridiculous™ meter . . . .

No comments:

Post a Comment