Underscoring and superseding all the griefs in Donal Ryan’s new novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, are joys of every kind ... Love is the great triumph and the great mystery, and the love among the Aylward women of Nenagh, Ireland — relentless, reliable and hilarious — is what I think every person hopes for ... If language — lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary — and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, The Queen of Dirt Island is not your next read. Ryan’s book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both ... These are vignettes, often powerful, sometimes too on-the-nose, but certainly never drooping or dragging. If you are the kind of reader who loves the connective tissue, the strong, sinuous, sinewy chain of narrative, you may find the quick march of the very short chapters disjointed and off-putting. But for this reader, the shape of the chapters, from opening lines to endings...forms their own satisfying chain, and it is Saoirse who is the chain for the entire narrative, within and around her family.

Mr. Ryan works the details, nuances and upshot of this relationship into an intricate, painfully perceptive picture of failed empathy, of neediness meeting exploitation, genuineness confounded by presumption, truth misappropriated and transformed into travesty ... As for Mr. Ryan’s treatment of Saoirse: I do not know of another male writer who has so perfectly captured the experiences and thoughts of a woman as he has. Saoirse’s shades of emotion and thought are poignantly true to life, recognizable, and perfectly conveyed. Further, as we have come to expect from Mr. Ryan, this very fine novel concludes on a note of sweetness and, also, in this case, triumph.

Exquisite ... Ryan...finds everything he needs to traverse the universe of the human heart ... The paradoxical smallness of this place is aptly reflected in the form Ryan uses for The Queen of Dirt Island. The entire novel is presented as a series of two-page chapters — each about 500 words long. That constraint makes heavy demands on the narrative, but the effect for readers is a series of emerald moments. We encounter Saoirse’s life in finely cut anecdotes polished in the tumbler of her little home. Everything here feels utterly surprising and yet entirely inevitable ... These stories could get precious if Ryan weren’t so attentive to the strains of violence and heartache running under the surface of the village ... Ryan captures the despair that sometimes opens up under a young person with no more warning or explanation than a sinkhole ... As the novel progresses, the act of recording and shaping family tales becomes central to the plot. Indeed, there’s as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write.

There's a lot of anguish in The Queen of Dirt Island, but it coexists with pluck, wisdom and humor, qualities that imbue the novel with buoyant beauty. Ryan's latest is another rich and satisfying tale ... Her life story is eventful and efficiently told. Each of the novel's roughly 100 chapters is two pages long, a user-friendly structure that beckons to those who claim they're too busy to read.

A book of opposing forces. It begins with an ending...yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind ... Wonderful humour punctuates Ryan’s novel, and thankfully so, because on the journey towards Saoirse’s adulthood and in the war for Dirt Island we are drawn into dark territory of grief, infertility, mental illness, suicide and rape ... Yet as ever, Ryan’s writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through its pages ... Within each short chapter, filled with compassion and cruelty, lie more opposites ... As you reach the final pages of this story, as one generation ends and a new generation finds its place in the world, and its own puzzles to solve, you realise that behind the scenes, Ryan has drawn the perfect circle.

The new novel by Donal Ryan is so unusual — eccentric and experimental, dramatic and emotional, funny and bizarre — that it’s hard to know where to begin in describing it ... For reasons unclear, Ryan has set himself an artificial restraint with The Queen of Dirt Island — each chapter is precisely 500 words long, and takes up two pages. This sort of restraint is the province of the French Oulipo school of writing: it’s a method of limiting how you write in order to discover what it is possible to say ... The problem is that once Ryan has decided that each chapter must have exactly the same word count, all scenes must fit that length, whether or not that violates the natural rhythm of the story ... These structural deficits are a shame, as stylistically, Ryan’s game is often as strong as ever, with plenty of sparky dialogue.

From the outset, it’s clear that Donal Ryan’s seventh novel will deliver the signature satisfactions of his unique style of storytelling: the temporal and the supernal circle each other warily; the characters are compelling and vividly drawn; the dialogue is profane and frequently hilarious; the prose drips like honey off a spoon ... Ryan seems to be up to all sorts of mischief in this novel. Near the end he introduces the novel-within-a-novel trope.

The tragedies that have shaped the women’s lives are out of focus, both to them and to the reader. The effect is disquieting. Their home is a site of mutual devotion, yet it is also beset by the unspoken and repressed ... By imposing this regular rhythm Ryan highlights the artifice of his composition. He shows himself in the act of arranging every narrative element into a comforting storybook structure. This prompts the reader to reflect on his apparently straightforward narrative arc.

Ryan’s short chapters act as memories and moments filled with reflection, bursts of emotion, or in some cases, mystery. Ending with Ryan’s delightful wink to his readers, The Queen of Dirt Island is a touching tribute to the strength of motherhood, female companionship, healing, regret, and forgiveness.

This story of four generations of Irish women fractiously sharing their village home in modern-day County Tipperary has a gentle heart and a spine of steel, its appeal enhanced by Ryan’s understated yet evocative prose ... There is emotional and physical violence in The Queen of Dirt Island, along with tender and deeply felt moments. The novel’s predominant tone is pastoral, consistent with the beautiful Irish landscape Ryan evokes with subtle brushstrokes, and capable of leaving an imprint on the reader’s mind and heart.

His decision to break the book up into short parts, though, can make the characters and their story feel distant. Though Eileen and Mary are vivid, Saoirse herself is a frustratingly blank slate whose interests and passions never become clear. Saoirse’s life, and her mother’s, can also feel implausibly charmed when it isn’t pierced by grand tragedy. Though these tragic moments are shocking, they are undercut by Ryan’s impulse to have everyone get along in the end and to deliver his heroine a sentimentally happy ending that isn’t supported by the novel itself ... A gentle bildungsroman that could have used a little more bite.

Inspired ... Short vignette-style chapters sometimes disrupt the flow, though each of the characters shimmers with life. Overall, this is glorious and moving.