3 Review(s)

This remarkable first novel releases the voice of Lucy Bastonme (or Bunty) as she makes her journey through adolescence in 1980s Ireland. Intensely focused, prismatic and delicately nuanced, the internal flight of the narrator finds expression in closely observed snapshots from a family album. At its core With My Lazy Eye is an exploration of father love in which the patriarch of a Dublin bourgeois Catholic household becomes ever more elusive and distant and his daughter ever more muddled, myopic and needy. Bunty makes discoveries about her father that free her from the prison and shelter of a protracted childhood. A new vision is won as she steps away from the past towards the light, metamorphosed. This is a quirky, poignant coming-of-age story like no other.