The Night Of The Party by Rachael English

3.5 Stars

After having read only one Rachael English book before and loving it I was really looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it didn't deliver the same punch that The American Girl did.  It does an excellent job of examining small town Irish Life between the early 1980s and the mid-2010s but I was just left with the sense that an elusive "something" was missing from the book.  I haven't figured out quite what but there was something stopping me becoming fully absorbed in the tale - this may have been that I couldn't actually find it within me to actually care about who had perpetrated the murder of Father Galvin.

The characterisation is strong throughout the book and our 4 main protagonists - Conor, Tom, Nina and Tess - all come across as fairly normal people; good and bad in equal measure.  The growth of their personalities from 13 year olds to their late 40s demonstrates well how circumstances imprint themselves on our psyches and Tom in particular demonstrates the disconnect you can find yourself in where nothing feels quite real and the ability to see all sides of an argument can leave you stranded.  He is also the poster boy for doing a job you hate but being good at it.

The plot itself can best be described as meandering.  Although the murder is the reference point used throughout to keep bringing us back to the four friends the majority of the book actually deals with the changing nature of friendship.  Once these four were so close and now they are drifting apart, as is the natural order of things when not living close together or having the same experiences.  They do reconnect when Conor begins investigating the murder again but I got the strong feeling that it was a very reluctant connection.  Apart from finding out "whodunnit" there is no real resolution to the story and the personal lives of the four are left dangling - which, I suppose, is fair enough.

Where I did feel the book let me down was the way each character managed to be a success of some description.  Although Tom starts off as a bit of a drifter who has no idea what he wants to do he soon finds his "calling" as do all the others.  I would have thought the law of averages would have meant that at least one of them would have remained in the small town, stuck in a job with no prospects but no.  The nearest we really have is Nina who has failed to make her way through the teaching hierarchy.  So much success for 4 connected people feels more than a tad unrealistic I suppose and I think I would have preferred it if at least one of them had been left behind in Kilmitten.

Overall, this is a book I struggled to become enthusiastic about.  The writing is good but it just didn't capture my imagination.