{"id":75799,"date":"2025-02-08T12:52:20","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T12:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/confessions-by-catherine-airey-choose-your-own-adventure\/"},"modified":"2025-02-08T12:52:20","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T12:52:20","slug":"confessions-by-catherine-airey-choose-your-own-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=75799","title":{"rendered":"Confessions by Catherine Airey: Choose your own adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div itemprop=\"text\">\n<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-32955\" src=\"https:\/\/t9z6e6y4.delivery.rocketcdn.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Confessions-186x300.jpg\" alt=\"Confessions by Catherine Airey\" width=\"186\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/t9z6e6y4.delivery.rocketcdn.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Confessions-186x300.jpg 186w, https:\/\/t9z6e6y4.delivery.rocketcdn.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Confessions.jpg 310w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 186px) 100vw, 186px\"\/>Despite its door-stopping proportions I couldn\u2019t resist Catherine Airey\u2019s much trumpeted debut with its promise of an involving tale of two Irish sisters, one of whom emigrates to New York to take up an art school scholarship ticking two of my literary boxes. M\u00e1ire and R\u00f3s\u00edn\u2019s stories span decades beginning in the 1970s when they\u2019re growing up in an Irish village not far from the house which one will paint and the other will eventually live in, making it the setting for a choose-your-own-adventure computer video game.<\/p>\n<p><em>I was at a time in my life where I got to thinking more about people\u2019s choices \u2013 how everything would be different if just the slightest decision changed.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>M\u00e1ire and R\u00f3s\u00edn have a thorny relationship: M\u00e1ire\u2019s volatility made worse by the discovery of her father\u2019s body, prematurely dead after a heart attack, while R\u00f3s\u00edn tries to placate her, disappearing into the background. Fascinated by the house that was once a boarding school, the sisters make up stories about its haunting, thrilling and terrorising their schoolmates. With their mother refusing to leave her bed or speak after their father\u2019s death, the sisters raise themselves, M\u00e1ire taking up with Michael, also a misfit in rural \u201870s Ireland with his racial heritage. When the group of women who\u2019ve taken up residence in what\u2019s come to be known as the Screamers\u2019 house advertise for an artist in residence, Michael and R\u00f3s\u00edn secretly enter some of M\u00e1ire\u2019s drawings setting in train a series of events which will reverberate through several generations, resulting in an estrangement between the sisters. It\u2019s the first of many secrets, some of which will be revealed some not, the biggest left to chance.<\/p>\n<p><em>There were the things you presented to people \u2013 your stories. Then there were the things you never confessed \u2013 your secrets. That was how we existed, how we knew ourselves at all.<\/em><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Airey\u2019s long, intricately plotted novel is a luxurious, immersive read, fitting neatly together like a jigsaw. It opens in 2001 with M\u00e1ire\u2019s daughter before winding back to R\u00f3s\u00edn in the \u201870s and ending with M\u00e1ire\u2019s granddaughter in 2023 after passing the narrative baton back and forth. Each section is prefaced with a scenario from Scream School, the computer video game which R\u00f3s\u00edn wrote based on the stories she and her sister wove around the house that fascinated them. Airey smoothly unfolds this complicated, puzzle of a story, pieces of which click satisfyingly into place, largely through the distinctive voices of its female characters, exploring a multitude of themes along the way. To say more about the plot would be to ruin it. There\u2019s a coincidence that may irritate some, but I was so immersed by then that I was more than happy to continue the ride. An enjoyable debut, deserving of all the brouhaha, perfect for long winter evenings.<\/p>\n<p>Viking London 9780241675182 480 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)<\/p>\n<div class=\"sharedaddy sd-block sd-like jetpack-likes-widget-wrapper jetpack-likes-widget-unloaded\" id=\"like-post-wrapper-52859811-32953-67a6b58a46a07\" data-src=\"https:\/\/widgets.wp.com\/likes\/?ver=14.3#blog_id=52859811&amp;post_id=32953&amp;origin=alifeinbooks.co.uk&amp;obj_id=52859811-32953-67a6b58a46a07&amp;n=1\" data-name=\"like-post-frame-52859811-32953-67a6b58a46a07\" data-title=\"Like or Reblog\">\n<h3 class=\"sd-title\">Like this:<\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"button\"><span>Like<\/span><\/span> <span class=\"loading\">Loading&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"sd-text-color\"\/><a class=\"sd-link-color\"\/><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite its door-stopping proportions I couldn\u2019t resist Catherine Airey\u2019s much trumpeted debut with its promise of an involving tale of two Irish sisters, one of whom emigrates to New York to take up an art school scholarship ticking two of my literary boxes. M\u00e1ire and R\u00f3s\u00edn\u2019s stories span decades beginning in the 1970s when they\u2019re [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[3164,26632,3726,4591,7390,3036,7392,38877,936],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-75799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-adventure","tag-airey","tag-book-review","tag-catherine","tag-catherine-airey","tag-choose","tag-confessions","tag-irish-fiction","tag-viking"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Confessions by Catherine Airey: Choose your own adventure - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=75799\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Confessions by Catherine Airey: Choose your own adventure - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Despite its door-stopping proportions I couldn\u2019t resist Catherine Airey\u2019s much trumpeted debut with its promise of an involving tale of two Irish sisters, one of whom emigrates to New York to take up an art school scholarship ticking two of my literary boxes. 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