All Our Hidden Gifts
Immediately queer and disabled – Caroline O’Donoghue knows the way to my heart.
Trigger warnings for homophobia and hate crimes.
I am already a huge Caroline O'Donoghue fan – I rated both her adult books, Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature, five stars and religiously listen to her excellent podcast about chick lit, Sentimental Garbage. As I am a religious listener to Sentimental Garbage, I think I found an Easter egg reference to the podcast. I feel brilliant.
Maeve Chambers' trouble begins when she sasses her Italian teacher and gets detention cleaning out a creepy cabinet where she finds a pack of dusty tarot cards (presumably the classic Rider-Waite, but O'Donoghue does not specify – please tell us, Caroline!) and a Walkman holding a mixtape from 1990. I know from Sentimental Garbage that Caroline O'Donoghue is a fan of **MAEVE** Binchy, and one of her books covered on the podcast is Evening Class, where the plot revolves around an ITALIAN CLASS. MAEVE. ITALIAN. SEEEEEEEE? I. Am. Clever.
“With everything to fight for,
and all our hidden gifts to help us.”
Maeve starts giving tarot readings and finds that she has an instinctual connection to reading the cards. She also finds the card readings to fill the Lily-shaped hole that has been lurking in her soul for the past year and a half – Lily being her [disabled, hearing-aide-wearing, ex-best-friend]. Everything is going well until she gives Lily a reading a card Maeve has never seen before, The Housekeeper™, comes up. The next day Lily is missing and it's up to Maeve, her new friend Fiona, and Lily's brother, Roe to find a way to bring Lily back home.
This book is immediately queer and disabled – Caroline O'Donoghue knows the way to my heart – and confronts Ireland's recent homophobic past and the chokehold that institutional Catholicism had on Irish culture. O'Donoghue does not shy away from the ugly parts of Irish history – Magdalene laundries, divorce illegality, and abortion bans – and the lasting effects it has left on modern Ireland, including homophobic hate crimes. The adversaries that Maeve & Co. battle to retrieve Lily are not only mystical forces and black magic, but also more obviously tangible homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and ableist challenges.
I really appreciate this book and I wish I could have read it when I was a teen. It is so funny and is extremely quotable. Alas, I am an Aged Millennial™ now and must make do with reading YA as an adult. I am waiting very impatiently for the sequel.
“Like all perfect moments,
this one is ruined by other people.”
Hard same, Maeve.
