The Bee Sting Review

that makes this book special. Each family member gets an extended section told in a style suited to how their mind actually works. PJ's sections are written with the specific anxious logic of a twelve year old boy trying to understand an adult world that keeps refusing to explain itself to him. Cass's sections move with the obsessive intensity of someone in the grip of first real friendship and first real heartbreak simultaneously, unable to look away from her best friend even as her own future quietly slips past her. Imelda's sections are the most formally daring, written without much punctuation in a flowing style that mimics how she actually thinks, and once you adjust to the rhythm it becomes one of the most intimate and moving voices in the book. Dickie gets the longest and in some ways the saddest section, reaching back into his own childhood and the things he was taught about what it means to be a man and a father and how those lessons set him on a path that the whole family is now living the consequences of.

What Murray is really asking throughout the book is how far back you would have to go to find the single moment that changed everything. Is it the car crash the year before Cass was born. Is it the bee that got caught beneath Imelda's wedding veil on the worst possible day. Is it something that happened to Dickie as a child standing in a garden with his own father. The book keeps reaching backward and finding that the moment is never quite singular. It is always a chain, one decision leading to another, one silence leading to a bigger silence, until an entire family finds itself somewhere none of them chose individually but all of them somehow built together.

PJ is the character i think about most. He is the only one of the four who has not yet had the chance to make any of the choices that damaged the rest of them and watching him try to navigate a household that is quietly collapsing around him, trying to be good and responsible in a situation that does not reward goodness or responsibility, is almost unbearably moving. There were stretches of his sections where i had to put the book down for a moment because i was genuinely frightened for him in the way you are frightened for a real child rather than a character.

The humor in this book deserves real credit because Murray is funny in a way that never undercuts the seriousness of what is happening.