Review - "Himself"

Himself
by Jess Kidd
rating:☆☆☆
published: 27th October 2016
spoilers? no

Goodreads

Galley provided by publisher

If I'm honest, I was pretty ambivalent about this book for the most part. Mostly what kept me going was how compelling the writing was, because I wasn't a huge fan of any of the characters besides Mrs Cauley. By the end, several more of them had grown on me and I was fully wrapped up in the mystery.

The novel tells the story of Mahony, a young man who travels from Dublin to a small village in the hopes of finding out more about his mother, who ostensibly abandoned him as a baby. Coincidentally, he can also see and talk to ghosts, although this plot point was never really explored all that much I felt. It just seemed to be expected that the reader accept he could do this. When he gets to the village, he learns that no one particularly liked his mother - some even going so far as to call her the devil - and no one knows what happened to her: although they all claim that she left the village of her own accord, one or two are of the mind that she was murdered, and thus decide to help Mahony investigate.

The writing style in this book reminded me a lot of Tana French, lyrical and maybe a bit pretentious but in a way that you don't mind so much. The mystery itself was also vaguely reminiscent of Tana French, I thought, but that may have been just the general vibes of the book. I didn't mind it, but there's only so much lyrical writing can do for me if a book is relatively slow-build as this one was. It grew on me slowly too - I took probably about half the book or so to really get into it, and I never was really all that invested in the characters, despite wanting to know the identity of the killer (I ended up staying up til 1am to finish it, so it had to be doing something right).

My one gripe is that, from the moment Mahony arrives in the village, basically every woman falls in love with him. It seemed kind of pointless, especially his affair with Roisun - I just don't get why it was a necessary plot point. But, overall, it was a good enough book, although never really amazing.