Caitriona Lally's first novel, Eggshells, portrays an unbalanced but charming narrator stuck in an overwhelmingly complex Dublin, searching clumsily for home. In the opening pages, Vivian settles into the house she's recently inherited from her great-aunt Maud, who "kept chairs the way some people keep cats." This dusty, cluttered house suits the eccentric heiress, who avoids mirrors and hygiene, preferring to cultivate her own "earthy tang." Vivian believes that she is a changeling, fallen out of a world of fairies and elves and into this one by accident. Her daily chore is to find a magical door through which to reenter her rightful place in that other world.
Vivian walks the city and takes buses and cabs, exploring streets with promising names (Ferrymans Crossing, All Hallows Lane) and performing tricks and charms--circling a particular pole three times, whispering to herself, and otherwise alarming passersby. She makes lists in her notebook--names of birds, favorite sweets, museum artifacts--anywhere she might find weird words and possible anagrams. Her fascination with wordplay echoes Lally's knack for language, and this emphasis is one of the great charms of Eggshells, a sweetly off-kilter novel about loneliness, communication and finding one's place in the world.
Vivian stumbles, and may never find the portal to the place she yearns for. But she makes shaky progress: acquiring a pet goldfish, throwing a dinner party of sorts, finding a new friend with traumas and eccentricities of her own. Eggshells is ultimately a funny, occasionally grim story with a sympathetic character who is either disturbed or a changeling from a fanciful world: it is for the reader to decide. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia