The Book: Orla, a young, teenage girl in England, is grieving the death of her mother from cancer and angry at her dad who drinks too much. Orla longs for connection but feels detached from her friends. She wants, more than anything, to escape her life and plans to run away to her aunt's home in Ireland. But just when she thinks she has all the logistics worked out her plan is thrown into chaos when her life literally collides with a homeless man who says he is Jesus. And ... maybe he is.
The Author: Eoghan Walls
Genre: Literary Fiction.
Length: 333 pages on ipad e-reader
One good thing: Eoghan Wells is a poet from Northern Ireland and this is his debut novel. He manages to recreate exactly how a 14 year old, not-too-well-educated girl would write: bad grammar, run-on sentences, missing punctuation and complete self-absorption. This may sound annoying but it builds the character of Orla very well.
One not-so-great thing: While the premise was interesting I kept wondering how he was going to write a believable ending for the story he had spun and, in the end, I don't think he quite stuck the landing.
Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":
Story/Plot: While there is a plot, this is mostly a character-driven novel. But wondering if and how Orla was actually going to run away without being caught and wondering about her relationship with the strange man who calls himself Jesus, kept me reading although I would not call this a page-turner. I don't think that Walls tied together all the loose ends by the end of the novel and that may bother some readers.
Characters: The story is told in the first person from the point of view of Orla who is an interesting character for whom I had sympathy and annoyance (as with most teenagers). We see all the other characters through her eyes and there was no downside to seeing them, especially Jesus, from the point of view of a teenager.
Setting: Although the story includes a journey on foot across part of England, there really was no specific sense of place.
Writing: Walls managed to capture Orla through the way that he writes her first person story. The erratic punctuation and the run-on sentences may bother some people but it seemed very realistic to me. You won't read this book for beautiful writing but you may read it to enjoy how he built character through Orla's writing.
