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• This is marvelous! I read that Doyle is known for his excellent dialogue and that is so true in this story of four generations of women. Set in modern day Ireland, flashbacks to the past reveal Great-Grandmother's Grandmother's, and Mom's lives to the daughter. I love the dialects and Irish lilt and expressions. This would be a wonderful book to read for a mother-daughter book club, or for any book club. The humor between the four women is a blessing and joy. Even though the grandmother is dying, and it is sad, it is not a sad story. This is one to read again! Includes a map of Ireland and an inlay of the particlar environs of the story on the endpapers.

  5.00 out of 5

  bookwren

• This book was wonderful. It really captured the sadness of losing a loved one. I felt myself relating to the characters, I cried when they cried, and laughed at Mary's cheeky comments. I adored the moments between daughter and mother. The author was great at bringing about touching scenes without making them come across cheesy or cliche. The amount of dialogue used was sufficient I feel for the setting of the story. I loved the language used by the characters and how they played off each other. I do not know much about Ireland or it's language but to me the setting seemed very realistic even though there was a ghost involved. The love felt by the four women and their acceptance of the beginning and ending of life. Even though Mary is just on the edge of womanhood, she has a mature nature that shows she will be a strong woman once she grows up. The parallels between Mary's excitement of coming womanhood and Emer's apprehension about her impending death reflected each other in a subtle but moving tribute to the processes of life and death. There wasn't anything spooky about this ghost story. It was more of a reflection on the different stages of life. The author provided a well paced and touching story that spans through each characters lives. Their childhoods, their adulthoods, and for two of them, their deaths. I felt the flashbacks where written in a subtle yet effective way. They tied the story together beautifully and left no questions unanswered. I will definitely be looking for more works by Roddy Doyle.

  5.00 out of 5

  mindaink

• Grand. Just grand. Not much else that can be said about this story that on the surface is a simple tale about a young girl growing up in modern-day Ireland whose beloved grandmother is dying. Of course, the story ends up being much more than that. It's a ghost story. A story about family. A story about love, growing up, growing old, and growing strong. A+. Well done.

  5.00 out of 5

  EliaJuarez

• A Greyhound of a Girl is the story of four generations of women who have united to ease the death of one of them, Emir. The other three are her daughter, Scarlett, Scarlett's daughter, Mary, and Tansy, Emir's own mother who died young and has returned to let her know that death is nothing to fear. In fact, Tansy says, "It's grand!". These four women embark on a road trip so that Emir can get one last glimpse of the home she grew up in and, on the way, they develop bonds that will ultimately transcend the loss of death. Author Roddy Doyle's description of this trip is one of the most marvelous sentences I have read in a very long time - 'One is dead, one is dying, one is driving, and one is just starting out'.Doyle reverses that old cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words: he weaves beautiful vivid images with a modicum of words, never a word too many and never one out of place, yet together they create a lyricism that sings off the page, that sparkles with colour and music and demands to be read out loud. This book is, on the surface, a ghost story. But it is so much more than that. It is a celebration of family, of women, of lives lived and death eased. But this is also no 'Circle of Life' Disney tale; it is sweet without being saccharine; humorous without being dark; touching without being melodramatic. In fact, A Greyhound of a Girl is the most joyful book about death and dying I have ever read. At the end, although I was moved by Emir's story, I wasn't sad; instead, I found myself smiling as her family gave her the gift of seeing her life one last time.

  4.50 out of 5

  lostinalibrary

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