Booker longlist. A poetic novel about an boy in the west of Ireland, trying to survive his first year in a new school (I think would be middle school here). The kid probably has autism, which I felt Feeney wrote realistically and sympathetically, rather than being a metaphor for the human condition or whatever, and struggles coming into his teen years in an all-boys Catholic school. (There's a scene at the end of Suzette Mayr's Monoceros wherein a similar school is demolished by a herd of rampaging unicorns, and Feeney seems to think the same treatment would have improved her school immensely.) The principal is obsessed with misogyny, and several of the students are reading Jordan Peterson, and in the middle of all this, our hero is trying to figure out who he is, an also to build a perpetual motion machine as a memorial to a mother he never knew.

The other characters are the boy's single dad, an English teacher (who used to be a special education teacher, before the school abolished the program) whose marriage is on the rocks, and a carpentry teacher from one of the outer islands. Both are trying to support the main character, both are themselves struggling with a town that mostly wants to pick at someone until it finds a crack, a hint of how they don't belong, and then peel them apart.

This is perhaps a kinder world, where a struggling student gets the help he needs from multiple angles, community can come together to build a boat, and we can explain the world through mathematics and poetry and woodwork. I found it a little too neat, perhaps, but also beautiful and woven through with humour and love.