I have to admit I found this one a bit of a slog to get through. Maybe it was because I was on tour when I was reading it and consumed it in tiny bites, but I suspect I just didn't enjoy it much.
Set across a variety of different time periods, the book follows Pen through the week directly after her lover of 13 years is killed in a car crash. Not that Pen has ever really admitted to anyone that Cara was anything more than a friend. Still largely closeted, she teaches at the Catholic school she and Cara once attended, lives with Cara's father in the home she grew up in and hasn't even told her mother she's gay.
This makes grieving challenging. How can you be a widow when you've never admitted to being in a relationship?
Pen navigates the week as best she can, doing all the practical things she can to distract herself from the
Cara-shaped hole in her life. Yet, occasionally, memories bubble up and blindside her.
These flashbacks show the relationship through the 13 years the two women knew each other. It becomes clear that Pen was actually obsessed with Cara's older sister, Kate, and only met Cara when Kate tossed a casual invitation Pen's way one afternoon. Thid history makes things charged when Kate returns from America to attend Cara's funeral.
I know this book is set in a different time, and in Dublin where the influence of the Church is far-reaching, but even with that knowledge, I found it difficult to understand Pen's reluctance to admit she was in love with Cara, that they were a couple. Or that everyone around them didn't see the truth, especially Cara's father who shared the house with them and surely knew they were sleeping in the same bed.
Pen is stoic to the point of obstinance and I think that's why I found it so difficult to get into this story. Cara was clearly not a nice person, running out on Pen often to have affairs with men and other women. Yet Pen remained a dependable presence, always there to take Cara back when she'd had her fun.
So, while I found many things about this book interesting, it wasn't an enjoyable read. I didn't like Pen and the way she let herself be treated like a doormat, denying who she was and constantly putting herself down for being large. Books about grief and dealing with it are hard enough even when the person grieving is someone you like.
I did find it interesting how the flashbacks were told in present tense though, while the rest of the book was in past. Something to play with at some later point, I think...
I'm not recommending this one, I'm afraid. It's well written and a definite picture of a place and time, but it's hard work to get through.
Don't just listen to me though. Here's the blurb:
Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Cara’s infidelities.
But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny. It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life.
