Tatty
Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey is a remarkable book, and it’s a real shame that it’s so difficult to acquire it in the US. (I knew about this book — originally published in 2004 — since it’s sort of an Irish mainstay; in fact, it was 2020’s One Dublin One Book pick. When I learned this, I ended up ordering a copy from the wonderful Gutter Bookshop.)
Tatty is the nickname for narrator Caroline, a young girl whose observations of her family ramp up from naïve affection to confusion due to her parents’ alcoholism to perhaps acceptance-slash-disassociation. New readers will undoubtedly make comparisons to Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain…but Tatty was first. (They will also probably make comparisons to Roddy Doyle because Hickey’s dialogue is so well-written. This is a devastating novel, but it’s also quietly funny [although several Goodreads reviews didn’t seem to think so!], and that’s because the childhood dialogue is so innocently brilliant.)
Two things I thought about while reading Tatty:
1) The novel’s just shy of 200 pages and is a quick read. It’s like a long-form short story (if I’m allowed to coin that term) … no dilly-dallying, no meandering, and the last two pages (and *especially* the last line) are just wow.
2) Let’s talk “One City, One Book” initiatives. We just went through this while selecting a book for MetroWest Readers Fest — many books were considered/tossed around, but we ultimately landed on one that (in hindsight) was a total no-brainer. But this process is a lot harder than people may think. Although Dublin has changed a lot in the past 15-ish years (and definitely more so in the last 5), in my opinion there is still a sense of shared experience and upbringing that unifies people there. (In 2013, I read Strumpet City by James Plunkett with my Irish book club as part of the One Book program that year.) What, in your opinion, makes a good communal read?
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