We Are the Brennans, by Tracey Lange, is a modern Irish-American family drama that is at times tender and other times fierce as it examines how secrets, shame, loss, and loyalty affect those we love the most.
A synopsis:
When twenty-nine-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. But it’s not easy. She deserted them all―and her high school sweetheart―five years before with little explanation, and they’ve got questions.
Sunday is determined to rebuild her life back on the east coast, even if it does mean tiptoeing around resentful brothers and an ex-fiancé. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them. When a dangerous man from her past brings her family’s pub business to the brink of financial ruin, the only way to protect them is to upend all their secrets―secrets that have damaged the family for generations and will threaten everything they know about their lives. In the aftermath, the Brennan family is forced to confront painful mistakes―and ultimately find a way forward, together.
We Are the Brennans is very much a character-driven book, quiet in many ways, even though it’s easy enough to “hear” this animated Irish family as they wrestle through past trauma and regrets. And there’s definitely more talking than action, with most of the emotional plot points shown as memories. It was those frequent trips into the past – rather than the alternating points of view – I found disorienting at times. Lange’s transitions weren’t always very smooth, and there were at least three points in the book where I flipped back and forth between pages, thinking I had missed something. Was I in the “now” or “then?”
But maybe that just echoed the experiences of each character, as all of them seemed to be living with one foot in the present and one in the past. Lange does a great job of carefully tying all their individual threads into one entangled knot, showing how – especially in a family – the choices of one affect the lives of all.
In terms of those individual threads, I really enjoyed getting to know each of the Brennans, along with the handful of characters brought into the magnetic pull of their family’s orbit. Lange wrote with such clarity about each character, even the family house, the pub they owned, the town where they lived – I could “see” it all, and it felt like reading a movie.
Though there was a touch of melodrama in some of the storylines, I thought Lange skillfully brought all the components together into an emotionally satisfying whole. The book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but somehow I wasn’t too bothered by this. I was left with confidence that for the Brennans, everything would turn out alright.
BOOK:30 