When Angela Devine's brother James is accused of rape, her world collapses. Because James is Angela's world: she has looked after him since he was a baby, and worked at everything from office cleaner to strippogram girl to keep him clothed and fed. These are heavy subjects for "light" fiction, and this ambitious novel occasionally runs into difficulties: Angela's rambling narrative style is maddeningly circuitous; her vocal cadences aren't quite right for a working-class Dubliner (disclaimers that she hails from impoverished Protestant stock and devoured books as a child notwithstanding); and as for James, his inarticulate, ill-directed hostility puts him closer to 14 years old than 19, and makes him hard, frankly, to give a damn about. But for pop fiction to tackle such subjects as date rape, media harassment, poverty and dysfunctional families in contemporary Ireland is courageous, to put it mildly - and that Purcell has woven an entertaining tale from such strands, and created such an appealing character in the feisty Angela, is confrimation of her great gift for storytelling.
