Title: How to Build a Boat*
Author: Elaine Feeney
Rating: 4.25 stars / 5 stars
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Favorite Quote: “Churches made her feel inadequate, but this one also made her feel unwelcome.” Feeney, Elaine. How to Build a Boat. Harville Secker, 2023, pg. 47.
Review: I am slowly making my way through the Booker longlist and hoping to read more of it before the winner is announced than I did last year. So far, two out of two have been great. (Also, I just looked back and it looks like I read 9 of the Booker nominees last year, but I don’t think I read all of those before the winner was announced…at least I hope not, because if I did, I have my work cut out for me this year.)
How to Build a Boat is ostensibly about Jamie, a neurodivergent child beginning a new school while still coping with his mother’s death at his birth and trying to find his place amongst his new peers. But there are also sections of the book from two of the teachers at his school, Tess who takes him under her wing immediately having previously been a teacher for special needs children at the school, and Tadhg, a woodworking teacher who is new to the school and seems to have a past of his own. All three of them, and a cast of other characters, build a boat as the novel progresses.
I’ve said this about a few books, but this has now joined the ranks - sometimes authors seem to so readily and successfully translate to the page a very human experience such that it seems impossible that they themselves haven’t either experienced it or witnessed it with a voyeuristic intensity. Feeney does this twofold - first with what it means to be neurodivergent in a world that caters to the neurotypical, and with the experience of being raised by an addict. Much like Conversations with Friends captures what it means to be a young person drawn unwittingly into an affair with someone older and the implications of painful menstruation and how it can so deeply affect someone’s life, How to Build a Boat explores Jamie’s relationship with the world and Tess’s relationship with her father (and how it impacts her relationships with others and alcohol later in life) with expert precision.
The character development and the structure of the novel also work quite well. The reader has windows into the lives of all three main characters as their paths intertwine and their trajectories begin to bounce off one another. Tess’s development, in particular, plays out on the page in vivid detail.
Really, the only aspect of this book that seems to fall flat is the ending. The book seems to be progressing towards some sort of climax that doesn’t quite happen. Sure [SPOILER ALERT], Jamie gets to go in the boat at the end, but all of the issues that the book developed until that point remain largely unresolved, perhaps with the exception of Tess finally leaving the husband who was so awful to her and for her.
About that Quote: The undercurrent of this book is one of a conflict with organized religion, at least as it exists in the presumably Irish Catholic school where the bulk of the novel takes place. And though this quote is from Tess’s perspective, it could very well have been from hers, Jamie’s, or Tadgh’s. Most of the characters, including those who stuck mostly to the background of the narrative, were at some point shown to be feeling inadequate or unwelcome, often at the hands of the church. And in many ways, the universality of that feeling extends beyond the page, which is one of the reasons this book will likely resonate with so many readers.
TW for How to Build a Boat: miscarriage, allusions to SA, bullying, alcoholism, maternal mortality
Have you read How to Build a Boat? Share your thoughts below!
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