SRP Book Review #4

Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes

456 pages

This is the latest book by Keyes about one of the Walsh sisters. Anna is the second youngest, and as the book opens she's temporarily living with the family back in Dublin after A Very Bad Thing has happened to her in New York. I can't say what The Very Bad Thing is, because you don't find out until at least 100 pages in. Since the entire book is pretty much about events leading up to TVBT and the aftermath of TVBT, I can't really say much else about the book. Even though it deals (well) with a pretty serious subject, I did quite a bit of laughing out loud, especially at the e-mail correspondence between Anna and her mother (pay special attention to Mammy Walsh's fondness for putting things in quotes), and Anna and the youngest sister, Helen.

I saw Marian Keyes do a reading from this book about a month ago, so it was fun to read again the parts she read, and be able to hear them in her voice. She was very funny at the reading, and thanked us for coming on the night of the Lost and American Idol finales. She's tiny, much smaller than she looks in photos, and her husband is kinda foxy. She calls him "himself."