... offers a young female perspective on a life overshadowed by violence, laced with black humour amid the ruins ... Milkman, from which Big Girl, Small Town’s epigraph is taken, was extremely funny, something many critics failed to convey in all those column inches bemoaning its apparent difficulty, and so is this novel. Written far more conventionally but similarly immersive, it has been set up to have broad commercial appeal ... It’s hard to write a funny novel, and as a reader even harder to find one, so to say that this book made me laugh out loud several times is no small thing ... Pain and trauma lie beneath the jokes ... I felt as though I knew Majella intimately by the end. We are told in the blurb that she is autistic, but the only hints in the text are a certain matter of factness and her occasional habit of rocking and flicking her fingers to calm herself down. Majella simply is a young woman with a sex drive and a sense of humour, so much more than a caricature of her disability, and this feels revolutionary. Big Girl, Small Town is a darkly hilarious novel about small-town life, which manages to be wildly entertaining despite being mostly set in a chip shop – a fine place in which to loiter with such a filthy, funny, clever companion.
... a captivating anti-picaresque, featuring as it does a young woman afraid of going anywhere ... there is a jaunty feel to her portrayal of small-town Ireland similar in style to Ithaca by Alan McMonagle, Upperdown by David Brennan and even the multilayered murder mysteries of Jess Kidd ... This no-nonsense attitude from our narrator is easy to get on board with in a town where so many people are out to harm. The locals with their memorable names – Jimmy Nine Pints, Hairy Feely – see Majella not as a human being but as someone to exploit. Gallen manages to give her protagonist agency despite this ... Chief among these needs is sex, and Gallen writes with searing detail on everything from periods to body odour to masturbation. Majella’s attitude to casual sex is, for a woman of her era, entirely refreshing ... Not everything in the book flows as seamlessly. The phonetic dialogue can grate, the pacing is off – at a major turning point we’re learning about how Majella got her name, for example – and the inheritance subplot is underdeveloped. Questions remain also about the missing members of Majella’s family, though that is arguably a deliberate marker of the landscape rather than a plot misstep ... Gallen’s prose is not literary in nature – but the subject of how impossible it can be for the individual to escape a hopeless environment makes for a compelling story irrespective of style. Big Girl, Small Town is a confident debut with a very memorable protagonist in Majella, a woman who is desperate to lead an untroubled life.
... in Big Girl, Small Town, an inventively foulmouthed gem of a novel, Michelle Gallen too defies gravity by portraying Majella’s insular community and her trammeled existence with such deadpan wit that sentimentality doesn’t stand a chance ... the novel fairly sizzles with such comebacks, perfectly mimicking the region’s profanity-rich patois (one that may indeed bewilder some readers and scandalize others) ... But Majella, our clear-eyed protagonist, is far more than a gifted wisecracker and Big Girl, Small Town a more shrewd depiction of provincial life than its flippant tone might suggest ... Neither crime nor killer, however, can dominate a novel that is, above all, an intimate portrait of a peculiar—and peculiarly resilient—woman who is fated to notice everything and forget nothing. With her specifically heightened awareness, Majella is a welcome addition to the diverse family of protagonists that includes young Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Hesketh Lock in Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited and Keiko in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, all of whom perceive reality through a similar lens ... unfolds in a series of alternating scenes, each one of which, along with some memorable detours, adds another layer to the subtly textured world that Ms. Gallen creates ... The novel’s repetitive rhythm, mirroring that of Majella’s life, is both soothing and stultifying ... The novel’s rudimentary plot is somewhat cursorily resolved, but that’s all right because it was never really the point. Ms. Gallen’s chief strength is her ear for dialogue, not her dramatic timing. Characters are revealed in their own words or in Majella’s laconic observations, but the resulting narrative, for all its eccentricity, never strays into farce or melodrama ... in this oddly affecting novel of everyday defeats, her triumph is more thrilling than any army’s victory.
[An] immensely lovable debut novel ... I read most of Gallen’s mournful comedy aloud to my wife, and even with my mangled Irish brogue, we loved it ... The listicle structure is surprisingly expansive in Gallen’s hands. What at first feels artificial to us gradually proves its function as Majella’s effort to systematize the chaos swirling around her ... They’re all hilariously odd and desperately tragic — the razor’s edge on which Big Girl, Small Town is balanced. Because behind the persistent comedy of this quirky village, the ground is damp with blood ... But if Majella’s spoken range is curtailed, her interior range is vast and illuminated by a prose style at once accessible and stippled with strangeness ... It’s the kind of magic you’ll feel lucky to find.
The big girl is Majella O'Neill; the small town, Ashybogey, Northern Ireland. Though both are a bit of a mess, I had so fallen for them by the end of Michelle Gallen's debut novel that I could hardly stand to leave them behind ... if Majella is the anti-Bridget Jones in every way, I found her just as endearing ... The sounds, smells, tastes and inexorable rhythms of the chipper are evoked with a hypnotic power that submerges the seemingly bigger plotlines — grandmother's death, the will, the missing family members — which seems to be just the way it works for Majella ... the Irish dialect is completely entrancing.
Some of these quirks feel a little overdone, and for a novel that rests on being a character-study of sorts, Big Girl, Small Town’s protagonist is exaggerated. That does not mean Majella is not lovable. In fact, this novel is, at its heart, a charming book — though it would be hard to say it was genuinely comic. The everydayness of the structure can become repetitive, even when that is the intended effect. The real light comes from Gallen’s vibrant description of a 'normal' town, which is off-kilter and deeply troubled. If the tone is a little uneven and the oddities sometimes forced, there is an easy warmth to Big Girl, Small Town that compensates ... It is difficult to know why she chose not to use the first person: Majella’s voice inflects the narrative heavily, with dialect being used freely and convincingly in the narrative prose. This means there are moments when the language jolts us out...This is nit-picking, but it makes a difference to whether a reader can relax into a book and inhabit it fully ... We feel a queasiness in how Majella is treated — often as someone to be abused, grabbed, exploited — and her bolshie attitude is refreshing. She’s a lovable character, and the reader becomes attached to her as the novel unfolds. She is sharp and distant, warm but no-nonsense. Gallen is not a queasy writer, and there’s a real attentiveness to the body, which is sometimes grotesque and at other times genuinely tender ... The tone is sometimes uneven: for the most part, this is quite a light-hearted book, despite the tragedy that spurs it forward, but there are moments when the prose makes Big Girl, Small Town feel like a YA book, and others where the language is explicit, and seems geared for a brutality that the otherwise comic lightness struggles to accommodate ... This routine-bound book is most effective in its attention to grief, which permeates 'normality' and rears up at inopportune moments, manifesting strangely. Majella herself is a compelling character, and perhaps a novel told from her point of view, saturated in her mind, might have been more effective ... an easy read, but the protagonist may stay with readers for longer than the novel as a whole.
The narrator of Michelle Gallen’s debut novel Big Girl, Small Town, Majella tends to her daily responsibilities with dedication and a dry sense of Irish humor that make for a delightful story ... Against this gray backdrop, she perseveres with a dogged sense of decency, eventually achieving more than most everyone else in town. It’s impossible not to cheer for her ... there’s no grand apotheosis: The townspeople tend to their daily lives, and Majella sticks to her routines. But the slow, mundane pace is one of the book’s greatest strengths ... There may be no other novel where the purchase of a new duvet takes on such significance and leaves the reader cheering for Majella’s growing confidence.
As friends, neighbors, and acquaintances filter in and out of the chip shop, the complexities of life in Aghybogey are revealed. Gallen has crafted a darkly comic novel about an isolated young woman struggling to find her place in a town still deeply divided in a post-Troubles world. Majella is a nuanced and complicated heroine, reliant on routines and largely dismissive of change. Infused with local diction, inflection, and slang, her voice envelops readers in the sounds of small-town Ireland. Fans of Sara Baume’s novels and the Irish TV series Derry Girls will adore this complex, clever, and deeply moving debut novel.
... hardly a knee-slapper, though there are certainly instances of genuine laugh-out-loud humor and cringeworthy moments of recognition. It is both funny and sad, which makes it all the more worthwhile to read ... not much overt plot ... extremely raunchy (which is where much of the humor arises) and includes, um, vivid descriptions of many bodily processes. Readers won’t always feel comfortable but will not forget this character any time soon.
Majella is a compelling character caught in a fascinating slice of time, and her journey is exquisitely rendered ... recommended for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Donoghue, and Sally Rooney.
Michelle Gallen’s debut novel, Big Girl, Small Town, has the makings of a screenplay waiting for the right producer. Much of the text unfolds in candid dialogue; the characters are sharply drawn and ready for a casting call ... Gallen’s frank character sketch of Majella is the book’s greatest strength, conveyed through the young woman’s particular sensory navigation of the town’s people and their doings. Big Girl, Small Town‘s language, with its detailed evocation of sound and action, infuses the story’s candid protagonist and the characters around her with life.
... sensational ... Gallen does a great job of teasing out the details surrounding Maggie’s death through Majella’s conversations with family members and her customers at the fish and chips shop where she works. Gallen’s also an expert at mixing moments of emotional intensity with mundane episodes. The plot unfolds in a series of vignettes that expand on a list of Majella’s likes (eating, Dallas DVDs, sex) and dislikes (noise, jokes, fashion), which make her outlook irresistible. Gallen’s effortless immersion into a gritty, endlessly bittersweet world packs a dizzying punch.
The plot hinges, quite shakily, on the recent and brutal murder of Majella’s grandmother, and its turning point is the reading of her will. But the novel’s vitality resides in Majella’s deadpan observations and in the acutely replicated dialogue that constitutes much of the narrative. Like a stage play, the novel unfolds in nightly scenes at a chip shop called A Salt and Battered! where Majella serves the drunks, waifs, and assorted locals that the reader comes to know as well as she does. The only disappointment is an abrupt ending that brings the curtain down too quickly ... An irreverent portrait of small-town Northern Ireland that is both bleakly and uproariously funny.
