Skippy Dies (2010)

This Irish book is brilliant. It's a little slow to start, but well worth the patience. You may think that having a title like, "Skippy Dies" gives away some critical plot points, but it's really about the ensemble cast of characters and their seemingly fractured stories in the periphery of Skippy's life whom we follow through these mundane, tragic, and spectral events. And it's actually a boarding school book which does an excellent job capturing voice, dialogue, and mood. Rare. My favorite takeaway? History is more about what's left out of the official transcript, forced out of the collective memory, than what is actually included. Indeed, memorializing past events gives us the permission to forget, but a few of us remember. ( )

Dennis “Skippy” Juster, a slight, geeky 14-year old boarding at a prestigious Irish school, does indeed die. Murray then shows us both what led up to that event and the aftermath of it. The characters ring true even at their most ridiculous and a painful and lonely heart beats here underneath all of the adolescent boy sex-talk. Is the universe, as one boy posits, actually made of loneliness? I don't know, but I do know we've all felt that way at one time or another. ( )

Just finished. I'm giving it 5 stars for now, but I need to let it settle for a bit. I almost quit reading after the first 200 or so pages, and I'm really glad I didn't. ( )

Loved. This. Book. Do not be misled by the fact that it took me a month-and-a-half to read it. It's fabulous. It's a long book (in all honesty, I think some judicious pruning could be done) and I read it very slowly, but I loved it.

I've been reading other reviews on GoodReads and saw several references to David Foster Wallace. I also thought of Wallace, but I thought this book was much more fun and deceptively lighter than Infinite Jest. More readable and not as self-indulgent. ( )

The book had really well-written characters in realistic scenarios. I won't say I loved it as I prefer books that are more of an escape than this particular story line was, but I can't ignore the fact that it really made me actively dislike some of the main characters - and any art that elicits true emotion to me signals an effective work of art. A interesting read, but can be depressing. ( )