Let me tell you, defending my opinion about this book at book club—despite the gal way across the circle who was one-hundred percent with me—got heated. Literally, my face was super hot, uncomfortably hot. Some people really love this book, turns out, and are willing to contradict anything I say in order to defend it. Which makes some sense to me. It’s not all bad. But when I add up all the problems I had with Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, the sum total is not, well, five stars. It’s also not like one or two. Another Irish title and another very intimate perspective (which we’ll talk about in a mo’), the exploration of the Troubles and some of the storylines were compelling. But cramming all of it into the set-up of an affair between a Catholic and Protestant didn’t work for me. It could have, maybe, in a different world, but not the one we’re given.

Cushla is a young, parochial schoolteacher who picks up shifts at the family bar. She’s also Catholic, a fact that matters greatly as it is the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Violence and tension weave into the normal stuff of life so much, it’s a type of new normal. Until Michael Agnew—a famous lawyer and friend of her late father’s—wanders into the bar while Cushla is bar-tending. And Cushla becomes the next affair in Michael’s string of affairs. For her, it’s an uncomfortable and conflicted journey not just into the affair, but into the world of affluent Protestants and relationships that will complicate her feelings even as violence comes for one of her students and their family.

Let’s just start at the beginning. The title of this book made me think it was a cozy. That and the author’s name. I don’t know that she would change either of these things, but I was not at all expecting the book that this was. I have not read Louise Kennedy before (because there wasn’t anything before. This debut novel has won her many accolades). And the cover doesn’t really look like a cozy, but it also doesn’t look like what it is.

Then a couple pages in, there’s an Eamonn. Not her fault, but that is my son’s name and it’s not one I see all that often, so I was distracted by it and wondering where his character was headed.

Not much further in I started to wonder… and check the title page… and sure enough I had accidentally bought a British English version of a book, again. (I have bought some on purpose, like copies of Harry Potter, but I have also bought used books many times and twice these were accidentally British versions.) This time, in a book that I am told is already full of Irish phrases and word usage even in the American English version, it makes the reading even more difficult. I’m wading through Irish and British English (published in London) unfamiliar words (okay, and some familiar). Whoops.

But by then I knew not all my reading woes were related to the slang and the language differences. Because this book is written in free indirect speech. If you don’t know, that is an official term. Though the book is in third person limited, there is a lack of quotation marks and it’s almost like stream-of-consciousness. Irish writers are fond of this sort of thing. I just reviewed Prophet Song, which is written like this. Bunch of rebels. Or they’re honoring their literary traditions, like James Joyce. And while I got used to it in Prophet Song and ended up adoring that book, I never found myself deep enough in Trespasses‘ story to either start ignoring it or understanding its usage here. Like why can’t I know who’s talking and when, clearly? Is there a point to this obscuring? To this extra work on the reader’s part?

Here’s the rest of it: this book was way too dysthymic for me, for the story. (I can take bleak like in Prophet Song, which was super bleak for a reason). While there are things in the world of Trespasses to be dysthymic about, these were relegated to setting and side-stories. Which means we end up with some dysthymic teacher who has a half-hearted affair with little to no reason for it and definitely no passion that I could feel. And speaking of the affair, when it came down to it, the affair is what did it in for me. I mean, Cushla is this young woman who just throws herself at this married, old dad, knowing full-well what is going on. And it’s not like circumstances even really did it… and as for attraction? Didn’t see that much either. You’re going to have a hard time selling me on an affair anyways, but to ask for my sympathy for the dumb girl who seeks one out despite knowing better? Nah. No thanks. Altogether, I was zero-percent emotionally engaged in the story, despite all of the horrors. Did it want to be shocking and horrifying or did it want to a quirky, indie kinda black comedy thing? I never did figure that out. But it changed genres a few times, and I don’t think it was a smooth transition.

So just like when I talked about this at book club, it sounds like I hated this book. I am beginning to wonder myself if this is the truth. I would have said I liked it okay and had moments when I enjoyed the writing style and some of the side-stories and characters and the sassy and kind Cushla (like as a teacher, mostly), but who knows? Maybe I didn’t like it at all and I just don’t want to say. It’s not true. I gave it four stars (probably wishing there was a 3.5 option). I definitely did go back and forth about it as I read. I hung in there, enjoying a history lesson on the Troubles and the minutiae of Cushla’s life… to a point. But when the ending was a however-many-years-later bow? I was overwhelmed with disdain, partly because it had somehow jumped the genre tracks again and we were back where I started: at cozy.

“It’s not about what you do here, he said. It’s about what you are” (p79).

“And now someone knew she was in a relationship, if that was what it was; mostly it felt like a situation” (p192).

“Cushla felt a tear form at the corner of her eye. She had no father. The only man she would ever want was married already. Then she had a vision of Gina as mother of the bride—as full as the Boyne and telling anyone who’d listen that her own wedding dress was three sizes smaller than Cushla’s—and the tear shrank back into the duct” (p198).