The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

This is a book of leaving. The cast is small--a famous dead poet, his daughter, Carmen, and her daughter, Nell. It is a scrutiny of familial relationships – in this case the fraught love between Nell and her mother, Carmel, and the complete disregard the poet had for all things familial. A talented father does not a good father make: in this case, not even a good enough father. But it is also a meditation on this other way of connecting – or failing to connect--not just across one's life time, but also across generations. Yet another example of how trauma ripples through generations. It is also a book that contemplates what love is. Nell, when we first meet her, is convinced that love is what happens to two people who are instinctive and native speakers of the same emotional and psychological language connect. When she is 22 and just out of Trinity College Dublin, she falls madly for a big country boy, Felim, and it takes some time for her to figure out that it is not love. She is handicapped in this arena because she cannot accept the love of her family and there are no relationships in her family to show her the way. This is a tightly written volume that can be consumed in a day (I didn't, there were distractions, but I easily could have).