The Granny by Brendan O’Carroll is the third in a trilogy about Agnes Browne and her family.  Agnes is the matriarch of a wildly diverse brood: there is the serious son, the gay son, the arty and sensitive son, the devil-may-care son (guess where he’s headed?), and the daughter with bad taste in men until she trades in one side of the law for the other.  And then there is Agnes herself, salty-tongued, old-fashioned in many ways, a staunch defender of her children, and the happy recipient of the many gifts from her Frenchman, Pierre.

O’Carroll is Maeve Binchey with a lot more swear words and a lot less soul-searching. Like Binchey, he weaves stories around each other, taking each member of the family through their own ups and downs, and then connecting everything together in the end. His stories make a twisting vine of family life that is always growing upwards, towards the sun, even when bad turns (and choices) bring one or another member falling oh so slightly (one even oh so greatly) downward.

Sure I liked this book, there is nothing to dislike. O’Carroll’s characters face struggle, change, and grow.  That’s all good.  Landscapes — Dublin and its environs, London, Manchester, and prison — are all rendered adequately and sympathetically (yes, even prison: they must be gentler over there in Ireland).  But the characters and the situations Carroll puts them into are just too formulaic — and the various rescues from inevitable doom are just too convenient.  Yes, O’Carroll calls one of the rescues a “miracle” but frankly, it is a miracle (unrealistic) every time he snatches one of the Brownes from the jaws of hell and lets them back up to heaven.  O’Carroll’s heaven does sound like a real hoot, though; I wouldn’t mind ending up there myself, dining with Elvis.  Enjoy this book, draw a pint to drink along with the reading, but don’t expect to be excited, emotionally or mentally.