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As she demonstrated in her impressive debut novel Big Girl, Small Town , Michelle Gallen can depict the problems and indignities of being a woman from a deprived background living in small provincial community with authenticity and humour. Even if you're not from this part of the world, a country that has stark divisions across religious and political lines, the experiences of feeling like an outsider and feeling held back from being yourself will still be recognisable to anyone.  The social and political context might also be recognisable however if you've seen Derry Girls . I might as well get the obvious comparison out of the way now (the title invites such comparisons), because despite the superficial similarities and the period of the Troubles covered, Michelle Gallen does move on and have other issues to deal with. If it helps however, you could see the teenage protagonist of Factory Girls as practically a sequel to the  Derry Girls  TV series. Maeve and her friend...

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...