The Country Girls

By: Edna O'Brien

Narrated by: Edna O'Brien

It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend, Baba, are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world - of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin – where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world.

©2010 AudioGO Ltd (P)1960 Edna Gebler

Friendship of circumstance

Newly exploring Edna O'Brien as a wise woman writer. Her description of Ireland sets the stage, viscerally visual, against which the dialects of the main characters in conversation pulled me even further into the world a country girl in Ireland existed in.

Beautifully written coming of age story

Listened to this book during a bitter cold snap here in the mountains, so I loved the imagery of the greenery and lilacs in the book. The two Catholic school girls and their escapades were familiar to me, even though my friends and I were a couple of decades younger. My first Edna O’Brien novel. Will definitely finish the trilogy.

interesting

This was slow (to me) at the start. I am glad I continued with it, though. Ms. O'Brien has a melodious Irish brogue that lends reality to the story.
A great coming of age story, with the thrills and heartaches of first love.

Author should not read her book

This book was part of a book club list, therefore I did not choose to read it. That said, I started off with the written version and decided that maybe I would progress faster with the recording. I was very excited to see that the author was reading her book, but, in this case I think that maybe she made a mistake.
I did not enjoy her reading, there was no characterization: usually a reader gives each character a different rhythm of speech or tone of voice... in this case it was monotonous, the story being a bit monotonous to start with.
And then there was the BREATHING, this was the most difficult part to handle as I really had to make an effort not to concentrate on the intake of air through the nostrils and listen to the words.
Personally I did not enjoy this book, there were too many unnecessary descriptions of nature, which I found had no positive use to the story, they just made it long drawn out. I think there are sufficient descriptions of the story and the characters, so I will not go into them in this review, except to say that the outcome was very abrupt.

A lyrical novel

Although it’s nice to hear Ms O’Brien’s voice, her breathy and halting delivery is distracting.