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language: Irish
country: Ireland
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 13.4.25-14.4.25
I picked up Gráinne Ní Mhórdha’s Bród pretty much entirely because everything about the cover, including the blurb, suggests lesbians. the cover art is two women sitting on a bench. there’s a rainbow over them. one of the women has a sticker on her back with the letter L on it. the book is titled Bród (Pride). the blurb includes the following after its initial setting of the scene for Áine’s move back home at the beginning of the COVID pandemic:
Déanann a cara dílis Lile an rud céanna—ach tá a saol féin trína chéile chomh maith…
and also, crucially, this, capping off the list of her activities:
Mar gheall ar an leadrán (agus an iomarca jin) cláraíonn sí le suíomh idirlín chun dul i dteagmháil le fir, agus tá torthaí spéisiúla air sin…
everything about this book seems to signal a coming-of-age and coming-out story about a young woman who realizes she’s in love with her best friend, right? as I said to a friend, it’s either that or Gráinne Ní Mhórdha is playing the world’s longest con. I expected something light and cliché but hopefully fun and — probably pretty tamely, given the art style — gay.
well.
unfortunately, as it turns out, Gráinne Ní Mhórdha is basically playing the world’s longest con.
the protagonist, Áine, is fired from her job at the beginning of lockdown and so returns to her suburban childhood home near Galway to wait things out. she supports her best friend who’s mother has been in treatment for cancer, she works out a bunch with her younger brothers, she helps her mom with her job running an in-home daycare, she drinks a lot, she goes on a few dates with guys she met online, and she, her best friend, and her brothers set up a free workout/physical training website to fundraise for a community memorial for a young woman who died in a road accident early in the pandemic. that’s it.
now, to be fair, there is a lesbian in this book, and it is Áine’s childhood best friend and roommate Lile, who reveals early in the book that she had a secret girlfriend for a while (leaving Áine both shocked and embarrassed that she noticed neither the girlfriend nor Lile’s feelings after the secret girlfriend broke up with her).
it doesn’t, however, seem like Ní Mhórdha has fully grasped that lesbians are not the same as straight women: for example, Lile apparently agrees with Áine that if any of the men she’s been chatting with online turned out to be shorter than her it would be a problem. she has a lot to say about how hot the two men Áine does go on dates with are. otherwise she kind of just fades into the background. Áine suggests that Lile, too, should make a dating profile, but Lile turns her down, and that’s the end of it — no further discussion of Lile’s love life, beyond Áine repeatedly getting performatively maudlin about how Lile’s sexuality will make her life harder. (but of course Áine supports her entirely and is mortified to think that she might have unintentionally been homophobic around Lile at some point; naturally, Lile reassures her that she’s a good friend.)
maybe this is petty of me, but if the main character of your book is a straight, cis woman who doesn’t even, like, vaguely consider the possibility of not being straight or cis, I just don’t think you should title your book “Pride”! it’s insulting, frankly. the book ends with Áine and Lile’s families gathering to celebrate the beginning of Pride Month/Mí an Bhróid, a celebration which centers not on the fact that Lile has just begun to officially come out to her friends and family but on the success of their fundraising project and how proud their parents are of them for all their hard work on it. fuck off.
the one review on Storygraph complains that nothing happens, which is basically true, but that doesn’t bother me insofar as it’s a pandemic novel. what does bother me is the blasé attitude towards the pandemic. some of this is, of course, you know, historically accurate to the beginning of lockdowns when people thought it would only last a few weeks. but throughout the novel there is almost no mention of the fact that people are, you know, dying and being permanently disabled by COVID. that, of course, would be drochscéal, and we can’t have any of that dragging down the tone of the book! mostly lockdown and social distancing measures are treated as basically a joke, with lip service to their practical importance as a public health measure. it is, again, insulting.
to add insult to injury, not only is Áine’s dad a cop (as is one of the guys she goes on a date with, although at least it’s the one she feels no connection with afterwards) but also Áine herself has applied to become one; the climax — such as it is — of the novel is two back-to-back tests, first her final driving test (the L on her back on the cover is the L-plate that goes on the car she drives to show that she’s a learner, btw, which on one level is fair enough but on another level I feel still strongly suggests coming out as learning about oneself) and then her final physical fitness examination for the police academy. she’s not convinced she actually wants to be a cop, but she regards it as a viable option.
by way of conclusion, I will leave you with one of the most genuinely baffling things I’ve ever encountered in a book in my entire life, vis-à-vis its implied audience. when Lile’s mother first gets the news that her test results show she’s cancer-free (later complicated), Áine and Lile’s families gather to celebrate. Róisín humorously quotes from Peig — perhaps the single best-known Irish-language book, a cultural touchstone that literally everyone reading this book will have heard of even if they haven’t read it — and for some incomprehensible reason Ní Mhórdha feels that she needs to explain what Peig is to an Irish-speaking audience. who the fuck does she think is reading this book???????????????
all of which is to say: it’s bad.
moods: hopeful, lighthearted