RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)This is an irrepressibly funny and poignant memoir of family life after bereavement ... O’Reilly brings to life the warmly raucous meals around the vast kitchen table, the dormitory chatter (teenagers on top bunks talking football, fights and discos; earnest discussion of dinosaur subspecies between the younger boys below), and being ferried to Mass in the family minibus (a 26-foot caravan, sensibly pre-blessed by a priest, was attached for longer trips) ... a cast of so many siblings poses narrative difficulties ... As a result, Sinead-Dara-Shane-Orla-Maeve-Mairead-Dearbhaile-Caoimhe-Fionnuala-Conall (always in age order) are left necessarily indistinct. It is his stoical father Joe, with his reverence for dogs, priests and esoteric tools, who comes into loving focus, adored and teased in equal measure. There are also superb pen portraits of peripheral relations, including stern-faced Granny O’Reilly ... A large family proves both a profound comfort and an essential distraction, but grief, inevitably, surfaces in its own time. These \'controlled explosions\', harrowing and cathartic, are tenderly drawn, and mirror the background struggles of a community processing decades of trauma.
