Bookworm in the City

My tbr pile is so big, that I lost a book in there.
(Confession or brag: it’s a thin line. I guess it depends on who you ask. Just don’t ask my mom: she’ll only roll her eyes.)
What happened, was that I started to read this book last year, and when for some reason I had to put it down, I accidentally put it on the wrong stack and it ended up on the tbr pile, instead of the “I’m currently reading these”-pile. When I was looking for a book to read for my reading challenge, I stumbled on this book instead, was so happy to have found it again, that I forgot about the reading challenge for a hot minute, and dove into this instead.

I bought this book in Dublin last year as a souvenir, and it’s very Irish.
Factory Girls is set in Northern Ireland, 1994. It’s about Maeve Murray, who has two best friends, Aoife, and Caroline. They live in “a shitty wee border town” near Derry, and the girls have just finished school. They have all summer to wait for their exam results, and use the thirteen weeks to work at the local clothing factory, to save up money for university. Maeve dreams about studying journalism in London, where nobody will know her, and nobody will care about the fact that she’s Catholic and has a sister who died.
Because they can’t wait to leave home, Maeve and Caroline rent a small apartment above a shop, across from the factory. The factory workforce consists of Catholics and Protestants alike, and even inside the small factory community, there is a strong divide that has tensions rising at times. The peace talks that are happening, are only cause for more tension. Maeve is relieved to finally find one thing they have in common: both Catholics and Protestants sing the happy birthday song exactly the same.
Their boss is Andy, who is called Handy Andy by the workers. He’s a creep who unhooks the women’s bras as he walks his rounds on the factory floor, and regularly calls women into his office alone. Maeve becomes one of his victims, but when she finds out she’s comped an extra ten pounds in her weekly pay for it, she only cares that in thirteen weeks, that would add up to an extra hundred-and-thirty pounds.
It is Andy who gives her the book How to Make Friends and Influence People which she applies in the funniest and darkest ways.
Maeve is aware that survival in their corner of the world, depends on being able to stay out of the spotlight, to keep your head down, and not make any outspoken friends or enemies. Yet just as she is about to make a clean get-away, she breaks her own rules and gets herself into trouble.

The book is written in accent, and I don’t know about you, but I generally find reading accents difficult, it slows me down, and words or expressions can leave me stumped, or require reading out loud. But when accent writing is done right, it adds an extra layer to the characters and the setting. I thought this book was an excellent example; the accents are used to mark the difference between the standings in society, and I could just hear these girls talk. And Maeve talks the best talk. She’s rough around the edges, a sharp observer, and aware that her working-class, Catholic background, is not working in her favour. Maeve is also aware that her normalcy about living with terror all the time, is actually not normal. Not only has she witnessed, and experienced, the violence of the Troubles, but plenty of “normal” violence and sexual abuse too. As she says: life is tough on men, but it’s always tougher on women.
Despite its serious setting and the roughness, there are plenty of (dark) laughs to find in this book as well.
This book gives off Derry Girls vibes (if you haven’t seen it: this is a gem of a show that streams on Netflix in the NL, not sure about other areas) but it’s way more real than that and has a darker sense of humour.
I liked this book a whole lot and it is a perfect example of why books make excellent souvenirs.