Faithful Place

Time for another book club book review.  (With two book clubs, these seem to come around pretty quickly.)  Tana French's third novel takes place in Dublin's inner city - it's a murder mystery.

I don't often read this genre, and if this book is typical of murder mysteries, then I think I can pinpoint why I prefer other kinds of writing.

The characters are pretty black-and-white.  They are either good, or they are not.  They are not terribly complex.  One reason I like the tv shows The Wire and The Sopranos is that those characters can make me crazy.  Crazy because I have invested interest in them.  I love their good intentions and I am dismayed when they make stupid choices.

Faithful Place relies heavily on dialogue.  However, I am not all that interested in 3-4 page conversations which could be distilled and not lose their meaning in half the ink.  I get that the main character has abusive parents.  I don't need pages and pages to get the point.  In fact, I get very impatient with writing that does lots of telling and not so much showing.  This book tells lots, shows less.

There are some Americanisms in the language of this novel that do not seem to flow with the occasional Irish dialect.  Do the Irish really say "get out of Dodge?"  Also, French uses the Irish dialect sparingly, and when her characters inevitably say "Jaysus," I feel as though I have to stop for a moment and re-hear the dialect as Irish.  It would have flowed better for me if she either worked to have the brogue more prominent, or not at all.

Meh.  I'd give it a 2 out of 5.   But that's just me.