“We’re better off without the men, aren’t we?”
When I picked up this book on my Kindle, I thought the premise was really interesting so spent many work breaks and commutes to work getting absorbed in the story.
It concerns Honora, a young Irish woman in the 1840s whose life is destroyed by the Irish potato famine and this leads to her ending up in America due to a continual desire to escape. I think the themes this book explored – the role of women, the treatment of outsiders and class, for example, are written really well and the characters are really engaging, for the most part.
This book feels very bleak and can be a bit hard going at times, but as a result it is a very visceral reading experience. The last 10% of the book involves Honora meeting a Native American called Joseph, which feels like a narrative and thematic linkage of how outsiders are treated and her choice of life with him over a rancher named Prosper who she originally escaped with to get away from her life of working as a sex worker.
A lot of drama is packed into 275 pages and while it was a really evocative experience, there were some elements of it which prevented it from being the full 5 star experience. For one thing, the villain of the story felt a bit too cliched especially with his expositional speeches near the end of his narrative arc. Yes he was horrifically written and chilling in his actions, but the over reliance on villainous expositional speeches really neutered the otherwise horrific power of the character that had existed up until that point.
I think the most prominent weakness of this story however was how unevenly paced it was, because Joseph and Honora meeting takes place in the last 10% of the book and it just ends up feeling like an afterthought, which was disappointing almost as if there was an ironclad word count the author had to reach and then realized plots had to be resolved and quickly.
Another plot that felt a bit too convenient was how Mary, a fellow Irish woman who Honora meets on the boat to America, turns up at the end with Ignatius and ultimately ends up with the rancher with her baby. The West can continue to be settled – hooray! I say that facetiously, of course.
Despite a somewhat limp ending, I really enjoyed this book. It has its faults and I probably wouldn’t read it again but it was still a commendable book about often overlooked aspects of history.
MY RATING: **** / *****
Every Book Is Beautiful 