That's That

Starred review from June 17, 2013
Broderick (Orangutan) was raised in Northern Ireland's County Tyrone during the "Troubles" that spanned nearly four decades. These formative years are told through snippets of daily life: beatings from teachers at his school, conversations with relatives, and various "firsts" as an adolescent. The news of the dayâthe bombings, kidnappings, and murders of Catholics and Protestantsâinfluenced the everyday routine under his protective mother. Desperate to keep her family safe, she refuses him any independence: "The answer is no, and that's that." With her son on the brink of total rebellion, she relents and Broderick matures from the mischievous, curious altar boy into a teenager with everything to prove and nothing to lose. Somehow, Broderick keeps the reader on the edge of laughter through many otherwise horrifying experiences and bad choices. He is a storyteller of great depth, sharing his life with the kind of brutal honesty and narrative skill rarely expected or found in a memoirist. Broderick is a writer's writer who has achieved a profound telling of his experience of Northern Ireland's Troubles.

April 15, 2013
Growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Although he was born in England, Broderick (Orangutan, 2009) spent his formative years in Northern Ireland, where battles between the British Army and the Irish Republican Army echoed the more general strife of Protestant loyalists and anti-crown Catholics. Broderick's father was a hardworking Irishman who kept the family in fairly comfortable lower-middle-class circumstances, while his mother was a stereotypically strict Catholic matriarch. Although Broderick intersperses snippets of nightly newscasts detailing the latest atrocities committed in the name of either Protestantism or Catholicism, this ongoing war rarely touched his immediate family directly, apart from the occasional harassment by British soldiers at border checkpoints. Most of the memoir offers more typical material about a kid discovering drink, sex and drugs in the way most adolescents do. Nevertheless, Broderick developed a deep hatred for the British and Protestant loyalists, falling into the cycle of blind prejudice that had been getting people of both faiths senselessly killed for years. Broderick's anti-English fervor and Irish patriotism are believable enough at first. But when he casually describes turning 18 and heading to London to work in construction, it's hard to understand why he didn't see living and working in England as compromising his principles. Once in London, he obtained a fake birth certificate and signed up for the dole; the highlight of his stay was hitting on the girlfriend of a dangerous gang bigwig and getting roughed up, which sent him back to Ireland fearing for his life. Broderick's rite-of-passage rebelliousness hardly inspires the sympathy evoked by Brendan Behan's prison autobiography, Borstal Boy (1958) or Frank McCourt's account of his hard-knock life, Angela's Ashes (1996). Surprisingly dreary, given the turbulent backdrop, Orangutan, Broderick's scathing memoir of alcoholism, had more drama.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 1, 2013
Broderick probably does himself a disservice by making his memoir so effortlessly readable: it almost disguises the artfulness of this vivid recollection of growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and '80s. As one of six children in a Catholic family, he faces an overprotective mother (whose I said no, and that's that was the enraging refrain of his youth); sadistic teachers; and a fear that his stupendous discovery of sexual pleasure is sending him straight to hell. Unless the British get to him first, which seems more and more likely to a community both appalled and unified by police brutality. Broderick becomes a wild young man, throwing over his parents' traditional values for drinking and fighting, and he ultimately must choose between his growing attraction to IRA violence and his love of family. Broderick brings the reader deep into the experience of his community: the absolute segregation of Protestants and Catholics, the suspicion toward strangers, the way disputes are handled when the police are no longer trusted. Best of all, we hear the much-celebrated but still-miraculous wonders of Irish people talking. Broderick's voice is alternately funny, charming, and soulful as he struggles with his personal demons and the meaning of his identity as an Irishman during the Troubles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)