Down by The River - Edna O'Brien

I knew nothing about this book or author when I picked it up from the library. I read the fly leaf and the narration was so descriptive I didn’t want to read it as I thought it would be bogged down by this style.


I read the first page and it was the same passages that I’d read on the fly leaf which worried me (!), then I turned to the second page and it hit me what the story was about. I had to re-read it several times, in shock as to what this story was going to be about! What followed was a marvelously lyrical and typically Irish take on a shocking subject. To write how this young girl would feel with such simplicity yet full of emotion was fantastic. O’Brien captured the essence of Irish teenage girls to a ‘T’.

I later found out that this had been inspired by a true life event which I remembered hearing on the news. I don’t know how the real life pregnancy ended but somehow I felt that the miscarriage in the book was a cop out, and the story did seem to lose its way towards the end and I struggled with the last few chapters