Ordinary Human Failings

October 30, 2023
Irish author Nolan (Acts of Desperation) delivers an insightful if lugubrious tale of a family under suspicion for a neighbor girl’s murder. Carmel Green, a young unwed Irish mother in 1990 England, once believed she was “destined for special things.” Now, feeling painfully ordinary, she mourns her faded promise. Carmel and her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, live with Carmel’s father and brother, both of whom are alcoholics. Her mother, an affable woman who held the family together, died two years ago. Nolan alternates perspectives between the four Greens and Tom, an ambitious newspaper reporter who becomes interested in the family when their three-year-old neighbor is strangled to death, and suspicion falls on Lucy. After the police take Lucy into custody, Tom sequesters Carmel and the men in a small hotel, where he plies them with alcohol in hopes of getting enough material to write a “major, state-of-the-nation piece” on the family of a child murderess. The Greens’ revelations are by turn ironic and sad. Though the gloomy subject matter makes for rough going, Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes.

Starred review from December 1, 2023
The death of a little girl incites controversy, blame, and exploitation in 1990s England. Ever since she was a baby, Lucy Green never seemed quite right: That's what her neighbors tell the police officers and journalists swarming their London apartment complex after she's blamed for the death of 3-year-old Mia Enright. Lucy's family--her loving grandmother, Rose; reclusive grandfather, John; alcoholic uncle, Richie; and unfit teenage mother, Carmel--arrived in England from Ireland shortly before her birth. In the 10 years since, Lucy's grandmother, her primary caretaker, died, the surviving adult family members each spun into their own detached, dysfunctional orbits, and Lucy clobbered a classmate with a rock and acquired a reputation. "That little scumbag" is how Tom Hargreaves, the smarmy journalist insinuating himself into the family's scandal-scarred life, hears her described. Tom can see the headlines already: One little girl murdering another, the cast of scoundrels, the stained family history--it's the perfect scoop, if it turns out to be true. His journalistic playbook includes lying, bribing, deceiving, and manipulating; he's equally eager to sequester the family from the eyes of competing journalists and to hoist the tent for his own media circus. As the police interrogate Lucy, Tom does the same to her family members, hungry for any morsel of disgrace. In the process, Carmel reflects on her miserable, dissociative pregnancy, and Richie and John steep in the betrayals and substance abuse of their past. Nolan's writing is equally painful and propulsive. As you turn the pages, anxious to learn the truth about Lucy and Mia, the story seems to mock your very interest in it: Aren't you, too, enthralled by the scandal, entranced by these front-page-worthy girls and their pigtailed barbarity? Suffused with empathy, Nolan's novel expertly illuminates the parts of ourselves we try to keep in the dark.

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Starred review from December 1, 2023
The death of a toddler is an extraordinary loss, made even more so when it comes at the hands of another child. Such is the case when three-year-old Mia disappears from a playgroup in the company of 10-year-old Lucy Green. The suspicion around Lucy is heightened by the precarious nature of her family's standing in the shabby London neighborhood, having just relocated from a small Irish village under scandalous circumstances. It's a helluva story, one that tabloid journalist Tom Hargreaves hopes to exploit to jump-start his career. Sequestering the family at a meager hotel, Tom ingratiates himself as a sympathetic ear to Carmel, Lucy's forlorn teenage mother, and an eager drinking buddy to Carmel's brother and father, Richie and John. While troubled little Lucy lingers in police custody, Hargreaves extracts the family's tales of unrequited romance, unrealized ambitions, and unimaginable betrayal, hoping to stoke the UK media's penchant for nationalist outrage and seamy innuendo. Pathetic Carmel, depleted Richie, defeated John--really, Carmel asks, "who would care about a family like theirs?" Nolan's readers, that's who. Through her skillful exploration of the burdens imposed by inertia and inadequacy, Nolan illuminates the link to tragedies both commonplace and exceptional.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.