thriller

Great read about some very messed up family dynamics! The only improvement I would suggest is that I didn't like how the years jumped around. I loved the different point-of-views, and the ending (holy!!), but I would have liked it better if the years were in chronological order I think. ( )

This was a very amusing read. What I particularly liked was that the points of view of the three brothers and their daughter/niece were written as individual chapters. So I could put the 'events' together myself.
The book opens with a funeral scene, where two brothers stand at the coffin of their deceased brother and review their lives.
Each of the brothers feels that he was shortchanged during childhood. All together they found their mother chaotic and their father, who died much too early, the constant.
Each of the three has his own primal fears that he had to come to terms with. One of them perhaps managed a little better than the others, but had different problems than the others. The 'typical' sandwich child is also exaggerated in the best possible way. Is his final account the best for that?
They are jealous of each other, be it in terms of women or lifestyle. But in times of need they support each other, always with the ulterior motive of how they can profit from it.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ( )

I adore reading books that are spoken about in a fictional worlds. This was a cute read to add to the peculiar world. It reads like our own fairy tales. ( )

I thought this would be a thriller, as it’s about three brothers—one is dead but we don’t know which and we don’t know which killed him. But to me it reads more like literary fiction about an unhappy family. My favorite thing about it was seeing Ireland change from 1/3 of the country turning out to see the Pope into the #metoo era. I found this book pretty unsettling, especially in its depiction of mental illness, so perhaps that makes it a thriller. You get the point of view of each brother, and while all of them are unsavory, you can empathize with each. Seeing the same events sometimes repeated from different POVs did feel a bit, well, repetitive, because the characters were laid out so clearly it was already easy to see how they felt about things, from the first time around. I would definitely read something else by this author. ( )