A debut novel following a former competitive swimmer and granddaughter of a famous Irish poet as she comes of age in the shadow of her family’s tragic past.
The novel explores love, desire, and the secrets of the past with the background of student life...And it does so deftly, with complex, but fully realized characters, and is so accomplished; so wonderfully written and thought through, that it’s hard to imagine it’s a debut at all.
Despite having frozen on the starting block, turned her back on her Olympic hopes and repeated her Leaving Cert in the wake of a breakdown barely mentioned in the novel, Beth is not the fragile and self-destructive heroine of much new Irish fiction...She doesn’t drink much, eats well, and makes fully informed and interesting decisions about sex...As she begins to explore the archive in her grandmother’s attic room, it becomes clear that the abiding sense of darkness in Beth’s life is not about her athletic performance but about the untold story of her grandfather’s suicide...Crowe’s poems haunt the book, unspoken, and though the device is obvious it is successful...I enjoyed Holding Her Breath. The premise is familiar, but this is an appealing iteration, stylishly written, with strong female voices.
In Eimear Ryan’s moving debut, 20-year-old Beth Crowe arrives at Trinity College Dublin accompanied by the shadow of her late grandfather Ben...One of the country’s most celebrated poets, his works are included on the Leaving Cert syllabus and frequently quoted at weddings, funerals and political rallies...What sets Ben apart, however, is his suicide: he died by drowning when Beth’s mother was still a child, so Beth never had the chance to meet him...Given the public’s fixation on his death, both her mother, Alice, and grandmother, Lydia, prefer not to talk about him, turning down interviews, burning his journals and denying scholars access to his archives...The title of Ryan’s novel nods to the other shadow following Beth: her past as a promising competitive swimmer...A couple of years earlier, a breakdown brought her Olympic hopes crashing down, and when she recovers enough to enrol at Trinity, she is eager to carve out a new identity distinct from her earlier swimming glory...Readers may wonder how many novels about students finding themselves at Trinity College we really need...Happily, Holding Her Breath takes us out of Dublin for the final section...It is on this road trip across the country that Beth uncovers hidden truths about not only her grandparents but herself, too...The beautiful closing passage will stay in readers’ minds, bringing this story to a satisfying conclusion.
