Are you a member of a book club? If so, do you meet virtually or in person?

I attend a book club run by Pangur Bán Bookshop in conjunction with Craoibhín Ballina. We meet in person once a month.

At our book club meeting last night we talked about Water by John Boyne. Have you read it? What did you think?

The Blurb:

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.

But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?

Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did – and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all.

Book Club Discussion

Water is a novella; 166 pages.

We had ten readers present at our December meeting and only one out of the ten didn’t like the book. However, she did read it and ‘got ‘it’ by the time she was finished. Starting off, she thought to herself, a woman escaping from her problems to an island, heard it all before. But it’s told from a different perspective than we’re used to.

The main character in the book is a woman, Willow. We praised John Boyne for his ability to get inside a woman’s head. Not too many male writers succeed in writing from a female’s POV as skilfully as John Boyne has done here.

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