https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/27/big-girl-small-town-michelle-gallen-review A young woman working in a Northern Irish chip shop is the heroine of this hilarious exploration of the legacy of the TroublesDubbed “Milkman meets Derry Girls”, Michelle Gallen’s debut novel explores the legacy of the Troubles in a divided border town, and, like Anna Burns’s book and the sitcom, offers a young female perspective on a life overshadowed by violence, laced with black humour amid the ruins. Milkman, from which Big Girl, Small Town’s epigraph is taken, was extremely funny, something many critics failed to convey in all those column inches bemoaning its apparent difficulty, and so is this novel. Written far more conventionally but similarly immersive, it has been set up to have broad commercial appeal. It’s hard to write a funny novel, and as a reader even harder to find one, so to say that this book made me laugh out loud several times is no small thing. Our heroine, Majella, works in the local chip shop, A Salt and Battered! It isn’t Aghybogey’s only chipper, but for Majella it might as well be: “Majella had never been inside The Cod Father in her life … and had also never knowingly tasted a Proddie chip.” From behind the counter Majella dispassionately observes her fellow citizens as they drunkenly lurch in from the pub to devour their sausage suppers, the routine barely changing from one day to the next. There’s no romanticism. Marty the chef, Gallen writes, “knew everyone in the town. He knew who was fucking who, who had fucked who and who wanted to fuck who. He knew who was drinking, smoking, swallowing or injecting what, and he often knew where and when. He always had an opinion on the why.” Continue reading...
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