Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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It’s told mostly from a Mary, and the dialogue is written in a different format without speech bubbles but easily followed. Here is where the marriage might mimic the Troubles. Mary's realisation – "Had we ever tried talking to each other I might have known that he was the one person who could understand, the one who'd already been on that lonely, bloodied road" – reads like the beginnings of a peace process.

This book hooked me from the start… the story of Mary Rattigans abuse at the hands of her mother is raw and painful but at the early stage of the book she still clings to hope that she will leave Tyrone and her mother like her siblings have done. A teenage pregnancy and an inexplicable shotgun wedding changed all her plans. Mary is bright, she has the drive and ability to fly away from her home; her abusive mammy and passive dada, the church and the petrifying violence of that time - but one mistake renders her powerless and her life is changed forever - she doesn't get that escape and is left to face her darkest fears Despite how good her husband is to both her and her daughter, she still treats him with disdain and blames him for her predicament. At times I wanted to shout at her character for being so selfish but as a product of a damaged childhood, she hadn’t dealt with her own emotional issues and in many ways was still childlike in her behaviour. As we follow Mary on her life’s journey and the era of time in 1970’s we see how things were so different then. So many religious references and that pissed me off. At the beginning it was comprehensible because it put me into the context of what was going on and how the MC was who she was. But still, pissed me off. That’s my preference, though.I wanted to scream out, too, that Mary was just a child, coerced by a man who abused his authority - something regrettably overlooked in the book; wanted to wrap Mary in my arms and tell her she owed no one no part of her. Mary falls pregnant at the tender age of sixteen during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Having been brought up harshly and devoutly, an unmarried mother was something to be talked about within the chapel and the community alike. Mary’s mother, someone you’d be stupid be caught talking about in church or community, takes her own action to protect the reputation of the family, and to save her own face. This is a very good debut which becomes absolutely engrossing as Mary battles so many demons and constructs walls around herself. She has little sense of self worth and it’s beyond sad that she misses out on so much joy although I do want to shake her sometimes as she drowns in self pity! All the characters are extremely well depicted, there are some to love (John, his mother Bridie and Mary’s friend Lizzie etc) and some to heartily dislike such as Mary’s hard as nails mother Sadie who is most certainly at the root of Mary’s issues. Yes, Siree Bob, she sure is. I love how that little phrase repeats itself through the book! This is a sad, sad story of the ignorance and prejudice of its time. A girl who loses everything for a few minutes of unexpected joy and then sees all her plans for life evaporate. It's a tale of two people who just can't talk to each other or admit to their feelings. It's dripping with so much repression and so many words unspoken that the reader will want to shake the pair of them into some sense. The politics, personal, family, and cultural, of Ireland during The Troubles and it's fallout was at the forefront of the majority of the story. It impacted the relationships within the story and displayed the tensions in Northern Ireland as a whole and within nuclear families. It provided a band of elastic which Delaney stretched to breaking point before releasing only to stretch again. Once the band broke so did much of the tension Delaney had managed to toy with, and so the final half of the book felt a little lost.

But I couldn’t DNF it. Yes a potential DNFed book that is a 4 stars reading! I’m weird! I’m going to tell you how this book felt like and I really hope that it will make sense to you (and to me). On the outside it feels baffling that two people who marry and spend their lives together can be virtual strangers to each other, yet this is the reality of many arranged relationships. Tish Delaney movingly depicts the life of one such Northern Irish woman in her debut novel “Before My Actual Heart Breaks”. Mary Rattigan once dreamed of moving far away and being with her sweetheart, but those aspirations were dashed by the reality of her circumstances. When we meet her at the beginning of this novel it's 2007. She's estranged from her husband and her five children have gone away. Now there's nothing to bind her to the rural farm she's been confined to since she was sixteen but she finds herself questioning the heady plans she made in her youth and finds it difficult to articulate what she now desires. Over the course of the novel we discover the story of how she got to this point as well as a vivid depiction of The Troubles as experienced by a Catholic girl growing up in the 1970s who felt the alarming proximity of this long-term and bloody conflict. It's a story that powerfully represents the tension between the life you wanted and the life you've lived.Once I got to the halfway mark the book seemed to split in two. The first half a promise that the second didn't seem to keep. To an extent, this book is a love story but by no means is it your typical run of the mill romance. It’s a love story about dreams, hopes, ambitions, family that aren’t blood and so much more. I just can’t actually comprehend how utterly beautiful this book is?? Tish Delaney is an incredibly talented author indeed. With beautifully written prose, this is a compelling read, particularly if you enjoy Irish literature and strong character driven novels. The only thing worse than being 16 with dreams of escaping a violent and abusive mother and heading for England is being 16 and pregnant with all your dreams shattered. Mary's parents broker a marriage with a local man, John Johns, a handsome farmer but one touched with scandal due to his parentage. Never marry a 16-year-old with dreams, a baby in her womb and a massive chip on her shoulder! Her wanting a better relationship with her Father, I felt the urge there. Her mother and her relationship was not ideal, far from it. All this is in the book.