This one took me a while to read because the pace was slow and the story felt stagnant at times.

What I liked was the writing style itself. Doyle clearly has a signature style that is unlike many others. He has a way with words that make the execution simple yet surprisingly entertaining.

I appreciate Roddy Doyle for the flaws of his characters—his narrator tries to be generous and progressive person but is hampered by his own humanness, and sometimes that’s a bold stance to take. If you are looking for the humor in Doyle’s previous work, you’ll find little of that here, though—this is a book in which regret overtakes nearly everything.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

I picked this up because Roddy Doyle was coming to our library to do a book talk and signing for this book. I wanted to get a sense of the book before he arrived. The problem is that I found the formatting of the book to be difficult to read. Perhaps this is intentional, or perhaps it is to be corrected in the final product but the biggest problem I had was with how the quotes were formatted. No quotation marks are used and instead, long dashes were used. I found it challenging to distinguish dialogue from narrated actions, especially without phrases like "he said" or "she asked" to accompany them.

Beyond that, I wasn't captivated by the story. I found it a bit tangential and I'd get lost in the rememberings and then have to recall where the character was when the memory started. It didn't flow for me.

I knew I was taking a chance reading outside of my comfort zone, which this is, but what this confirmed is that I am best suited to a humorous romance. For that reason, I'm not going to give it a star rating. I'm sure there will be others who love this book, but it wasn't for me.