To The Last Page

Michelle Gallen’s Big Girl, Small Town is being promoted as Milkman meets Derry Girls , setting up expectations that Michelle Gallen’s debut novel almost certainly cannot hope to meet. Inevitably, even though it opens with a quote from Anna Burns’s extraordinary work, it doesn’t measure up to the literary merits and philosophical insights of Milkman ‘s view of living in a world shaped by the inescapable stranglehold of the twin authoritarian influence of religious observance and paramilitary terror, nor does it have quite the humorous exaggeration of the same conditions of Derry Girls . And yet in its own way, and from a Northern Irish small town perspective, Big Girl, Small Town is another small masterpiece that draws from that wealth of observations to be made about ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. It seems a little bit of a familiar literary contrivance use a character with some minor level of autism who is unable to comprehend all the subtleties insinuations and soc...