Edward Delaney's background in the teaching and practice of journalism (the Denver Post, the Colorado Springs Gazette) underlies his fiction; his writing is muscular and taut. Broken Irish moves between a cast of characters in alternating chapters and shifting points of view that average two or three pages in length, giving the story momentum as it unfolds.
Set in Boston--Southie in particular--in the late 1990s, the book gives the reader a sense of foreboding, of a society disintegrating. Delaney writes lucidly about the struggles of these characters in a community that neither supports nor actively ruins their intentions, but is a kind of wilderness where what you choose to expect of others, even if it's good, will likely result in disappointment. One man struggles with a drinking problem and a reason for living, expecting no improvements; a teenager moves in with her thug boyfriend, expecting only the best; a mother copes (or, more accurately, assiduously avoids coping) with the loss of her husband and the complete withdrawal of her son, expecting that going through the simple, basic motions of life will shine some light on what needs to happen next. There's a fair amount of that in this book--the faith, conscious or not, that change will happen on its own accord, that mere people have little hope of shaping their own outcomes. The drama of people reaching that conclusion, or its opposite, lends Broken Irish its power--a great story that reaches into a reader's life and makes us reconsider how autonomous we really are. --Matthew Tiffany, counselor, writer for Condalmo