Sláinte! The Strawberry Beds Job

Thanks to BooksGoSocial, the author, and NetGalley for this ARC of Roy Hunt's 'Sláinte! The Strawberry Beds Job.'

I was attracted to this one by the description of this being a tale of a building site and the associated characters in Dublin in 1984. Growing up around that time and with friends and family involved in the building trade I was looking forward to reading this take on it. I enjoyed it. It's a gentle narrative about the ins-and-outs, trials and tribulation of being in that trade in an Ireland struggling economically when work was hard to come by - for contractors and individuals - and conditions on the site and off could be rough. I would say it really captures what it was like - clearly the author lived it!

That said, it meanders along like more of a memoir than a narrative driven fiction. The characters are well drawn and written and you do get a very real sense of what it was like to be in that world at the time but the theme of the company being close to going out of business didn't seem like a strong enough hook to hang the momentum of the story on.

As someone who grew up at the time in Ireland, a couple of things didn't set well with me - there's talk of characters being divorced. Although people routinely separated, divorce didn't come into Ireland until the 90s. There was divorce in the UK so maybe that's the thinking though it didn't appear that these couples were married in the UK. Also there's talk about cars undergoing the MOT test. There was no MOT-like test in Ireland until the NCT was introduced in 2000. I'd recommend these be looked at for tweaking before publication. There are also some typos and misspellings throughout so it needs a good sweep for those before going public.

Honestly this is more of a 2.5 or a 3 but the nostalgia factor makes it a 4 for me and that's really the market that will enjoy this one. I'd definitely enjoy catching up with these characters in subsequent books.