The First Time I Said Goodbye by Claire Allan

This was a charming narrative that pulled me in right from the beginning. I had just enough curiosity to read through to the big reunion scene at the end, which was so abrupt and unsatisfactory I was glad I wasn’t very invested in the story or these characters. But by this point I think there was only 10% to go. I usually don’t do that, I either DNF or commit to finishing.

That was just such a ridiculous, contrived plot line that I lost interest and skimmed the rest of the book. So she writes Ray a letter, and instead of sharing this situation with the man she adores and trying to work out a solution, she tells him she never loved him and was just using him to get to America. Then Stella’s father dies unexpectedly and she feels like she can’t leave her devastated family, which would struggle financially and emotionally without her. The pair parted, knowing it would only be for a short time. Then whatever the hell he was doing there became unnecessary and Ray had to return to the US immediately, before all Stella’s paperwork was ready. Everything was wonderful and she was going to marry him and move to America. I enjoyed the early descriptions of life in a big, poor-but-happy Irish family and the sweet love affair Stella had with Ray, a Marine who was stationed in Ireland for some non-WWII reason. Stella’s story seemed to be set during WWII, until I realized the date was 1959. But Stella has another secret reason that she wants to return to Ireland for the first time in 50 years. She accompanies her mother Stella on a trip to Ireland after the funeral, to meet the family she’s never seen. The character of Annabel had one defining character trait - she loved her father and was filled with grief because he died.

So little actually happens, it’s hard to believe the author was able to drag this story on for 312 pages. Am I too picky? Maybe, but it would have added depth to these two very important characters if the author had at least tried to be authentic to the American vernacular. A few passing references to California, WalMart, and the Grand Canyon did little in the face of almost every sentence containing British/Irish vernacular such as bin bags, article, gone 6:00, etc. I little research would have made the dialogue much more real and would have enhanced the two characters' foreign status and isolation from the rest of the characters which would have made a good novel better. When I discovered that the author was a journalist, it just confirmed my feeling that she had been quite lazy in creating dialogue for these characters. The only problem here is that they spoke like people who had been raised in Great Britain/Ireland. My only complaint was that the main character and one of the secondary characters were supposed to be American-born and raised. It was predictable, but predictability can be comforting. The plot and pacing were good, the characters were well fleshed-out.

The First Time I Said Goodbye by Claire Allan