Rating: 2/5
Review:
Very disappointing
I enjoyed The Glorious Heresies very much so it pains me to
say this, but I got to about half-way in The Blood Miracles and gave up. I may go back to it at some point, but for
now I've had enough.
The Blood Miracles picks up Ryan Cusack's story from the end
of The Glorious Heresies. After a sort
of recuperation period he is back at work with Dan, organising a new drug route
from the Camorra in Naples. He continues to drink and use drugs, so his
life continues as a series of mess-ups (not the exact phrase used in the
narrative) and dealings with dangerous people as things fall apart with
Karine…and so on.
Lisa McInerney writes as well as in the first book, but I
needed more that The Blood Miracles offers, I'm afraid. There is no leaven this time of comedy or
humanity, nor any of the background social commentary; it's just a long, bleak
slog of Ryan messing up, getting into trouble, allowing his addictions to spoil
things, and so on. It's a convincing
portrait, but we've already had that, better done, in The Glorious Heresies and
in the end I simply couldn’t find a reason to carry on reading.
Lisa McInerney is a very good writer and I am genuinely
sorry to have to be critical of this book, but it really fell a long way short
of what I would expect from her and I can't recommend it.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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