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Book Club Reviews
This page is a continuation of the book titles and authors that have been studied by our Church Book Club and reports on their reviews and discussions. Click on the appropriate title below to take you to the respective review:
V The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
V The Spy Game
by Georgina Harding
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For further information and to contact someone about our Church Book Club please refer to our Contacts Page.
Please do join the group if you are interested in reading any of the books and passing on your thoughts about them.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008 and winner of the Costa Novel Award 2008, the book concerns the dialogue between psychiatrist Dr Grene and elderly Roseanne McNulty who was committed to a mental hospital as a young woman. Dr Grene's purpose is to discern whether Roseanne can safely be discharged into the community when the mental institution is closed, but his investigation uncovers a shocking secret connected to the circumstances of her committal.
The Costa judges described this book as an "exquisitely written love story which takes you on an unforgettable journey" but the love story is very much bound up with the troubled history of Ireland in the twentieth century.
The Costa judges described this book as an "exquisitely written love story which takes you on an unforgettable journey" but the love story is very much bound up with the troubled history of Ireland in the twentieth century.
This book was generally agreed to have an easy and fluid prose style, with elegant and atmospheric description and mood creation. However, it was felt that the book was weak on plot, lacked action, and the main characters were not particularly sympathetic, which made it difficult to empathize with them. Members found the book boring and only two had struggled through to the end. Set in the early 1960s, the book prompted discussion on the different way bereaved children are treated now in comparison with the over-sheltering of the middle of the last century.
The group generally thought that the author's descriptions and his portrayal of Brooklyn in the 1950s and Irish community life on both side of the Atlantic were excellent, but felt that something had gone wrong with the plot. Most readers felt that the ending was unsatisfactory although for different reasons, and there was a feeling that the main character had been inconsistent in the second half of the book. There were also varying sympathies for the two male love interest characters. No one particularly thought that the book had deserved to win the Costa Prize, althought they did not know what the opposition had been.
More book titles later...