Every character is horribly selfish and cruel, and I found the whole book extremely irritating. The only reason I stuck it out was because my coworkers love it and I wanted to try to love it for their sakes.
****UPDATE**
Saw this article and it perfectly captures the essence of Wuthering Heights. Specifically, it's the first paragraph which is perfection, and I'll copy it here in case the link ever dies:
“Wuthering Heights is the story of a group of people who eat the most miserable meals imaginable, and cannot experience love as a result. Sometimes they have tea, but more often they are merely offered it, and decide they are too furious to have tea, and die instead. Here is every meal the characters of Wuthering Heights almost eat before being interrupted by sex-rage and dying.” -Mallory Ortberg, The Toast
Perfect book for waiting out a super typhoon, especially if there is a beer vending machine three floors below you.
The book is very subtle, and at the beginning a little slow. Give it time. The magic is in the layering, the shifting, and the repeated tiny dawnings of understanding that start the process anew. Quiet, delicate, and profound.
This book is not about the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, it is about Gerry Adams, Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, and other big figures in the IRA and Provisional IRA. Pieces of Jean McConville's story, and that of her family, are dropped into the narrative at irregular intervals, disrupting the flow of both her story and the main story. I wish that Jean's story was separated out and made into its own book because I found it very compelling, and the story of the IRA/Provo bigwigs less so. I also didn't like how whenever a new person was introduced in the main story (IRA/Provo bigwigs story) we had to have the person's whole biography. It made for really jarring reading, taking me out of the flow of the story and into some pointless multi-page backstory, and then rushing me forward back into the flow with little more than the sense of “Ok, this guy is IRA/British secret service/other paramilitary”.
I like knowing more about Northern Ireland and the Troubles, but this book wasn't an enjoyable read.
