Supremely pleasurable escapism, with characters I want to get to know better. I didn’t think of myself as the kind of reader to appreciate “gentle” reads, but I guess it can’t be all sabotage and murder and nihilism all the time, can it?

Honestly, reading this book reminded me of the way I read during summer when I was a kid, unheeding of wider opinion and caring only for a good story (usually one checked out of the adult section of the library). The kind of reading where the words sort of disappear and the characters start to feel like real people. Reading that leaves you dreamy and restless with a longing to go to a place that never existed, or to a time that no longer does.

Whereas Taylor could have succumbed to mindless nostalgia, there is in this book an implicit awareness that some things improve over time (especially in regards to medical interventions) and that not all was rosy in the past. There have always been heartbreaking losses and drunk husbands and petty people with too much money and power. Looking back, the reader knows that violence looms over the characters, though they don’t know it, themselves: It’s the mid-1960s in Northern Ireland, and there remain but a handful of years before the Troubles.

But Taylor imbues his writing with humor and with a faith in the goodness of most people and in the ability for things to work out in the end that in my fouler moods I might find obnoxiously naïve, but which today I find charming and heartening.