Halsey Street

This book is about complex relationships between (i) people and (ii) people and their environment. Every character is both lovable and hatable at the same time. Their actions and motivations are complex and nuanced. I really enjoyed reading this book because it felt like an accurate reflection of a broken family and seeing one's hometown lose its character. A phenomenal debut novel!

3.5 stars. This wasn't a book I fell in love with straight away, but it grew on me and the ending was so beautiful that I had to knock it up a star (or a half, if we could). A frustrating read at times. This is due, firstly, to the pure stubbornness of many of the characters, which leads to predictable, inevitable scenarios that the reader can see coming from a mile off. It also, I felt, made the plot feel fairly repetitive. The other reason I found this book frustrating is that it seemed Coster was trying to cover so many issues at once (gentrification, dysfunctional family relationships, classism, loss, the importance of “home”, generational shifts....), which while all very interesting and worthy of exploration made it difficult for the reader become swept away in the overarching story. Perhaps, this debut novel was overly long and needed some trimming, because having said all that what is here was fantastic. Coster has crafted characters with a multitude of flaws that are still possible to understand and feel sympathy towards. Not a perfect book by any means, and I wasn't on board the whole way through, but there was a lot I loved and I've certainly taken a lot from it. Really intrigued to see how Coster develops as an author and what she writes next!