Aingeala Flannery

Aingeala Flannery's prose is smooth and shot through with darkly wry humour; her characters are well-observed and convincing. When seen as a set of vignettes of life in an Irish seaside town over the last 30 years or so, this book works well. But is The Amusements actually a novel? That's the aspect in which Flannery failed to convince me. The acknowledgements make clear that a couple of the chapters started life as individual short stories, and while I'm sure Flannery revised them before including them here, she didn't seem to find a way to make them—or the rest of the chapters—cohere as a whole. There's not enough focus, not enough of a connective thread. If I had to guess, Flannery was told "these short stories are great, but short stories don't sell, we'll publish your work if you can turn it into a novel in a fortnight."… (altro)