Book review: Deeply moving, real life Dublin

'May All Your Skies Be Blue' is a deeply moving story, full of relatable characters, that will soften the hardest of hearts

Fíona Scarlett’s first novel, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, was a huge success.

• May All Your Skies Be Blue 
• Fiona Scarlett
• Faber, €16.99

Fiona Scarlett’s second novel,  May All Your Skies Be Blue, revolves around the character of Shauna, a middle-aged woman who runs a hair salon in a fictional Dublin suburb. 

The story is told in two parallel timelines, with chapters changing between the present and Shauna’s childhood years.

It’s an effective device. In one chapter we meet giddy, hopeful young people and in the next we see the hard reality of their middle-aged lives.

As with Scarlett’s first novel, Boys Don’t Cry, the book focuses strongly on the ups and downs of working-class life, which is contrasted effectively with the more privileged existences of middle-class Dublin on the rare occasions that they intersect.

We meet Shauna at the start of a seemingly typical day in her hair salon, a business that she inherited from her mother and stubbornly refuses to modernise. 

The significance of this refusal to change becomes more and more apparent as the story unfolds.

More than anything else, the novel is a love story about Shauna and her childhood sweetheart, Dean. 

Surrounded by a supporting cast of close and not-so-close friends, we watch them as they move past the milestones of their early lives.

As Shauna and Dean move towards adulthood they become more restless, more impatient to see the world beyond their immediate neighbourhood. 

Dean is desperate to move away from his alcoholic parents, Shauna just wants adventure. This yearning for escape is at the root of one of the key tensions in the story. 

The characters find their suburb of Hoodstown limiting and dull but it’s the only place they can truly be themselves.

Throughout the book, characters from either side of Dublin’s class divide don’t mix well. Whether in youth or middle-age, Shauna and her comrades are ill at ease when they encounter outsiders or leave their familiar stomping ground.

Shauna, then, is caught in a love triangle of sorts between her adventurous lover Dean and her attachment to home, embodied by her mother. 

The harder Shauna works to resolve the conflict within her, the more her mother tells her to go and live and her own life, the tighter her binds become.

The book is dialogue heavy, but this is just the author playing to her strengths. Scarlett has a rare gift for putting believable words in the mouths of believable characters. 

She also has a knack for drawing the reader’s attention to seemingly small details that reveal much about a character. 

Shauna, for example, always mops the floor of the salon first thing in the morning with a combination of “sudsy water, splash of Dettol, smidge of Lenor. Just how Ma had forever done it”. 

Even when mopping the floor, her mother’s ceremonies must be observed. But we also learn that the Lenor was Shauna’s “addition over the years” — so she has a hidden rebellious streak after all.

This is seen throughout the novel: Shauna’s inner conflicts are subtly and communicated without becoming repetitive or unoriginal. 

The authenticity of the dialogue and believability of the characters are the things that make you root for them.

We’re desperate for Shauna to succeed even as she sabotages her own happiness. 

At times, such as the passages where Dean and Shauna appear to be on the cusp of their happily-ever-after, Scarlett tries a little too hard to pull on our heartstrings, but such slips are rare. 

This is a deeply moving story, full of relatable characters, that will soften the hardest of hearts.

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