Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson - Review

I saw someone on my Instagram reading this book and was really intrigued by the premise. It isn't out yet so I went looking on Netgalley and found it! So I requested it and got it soon after! So thank you very much to Hodder & Stoughton for granting me access to this book. I absolutely raced through it, it's very compelling and I couldn't stop reading. 

I was provided with an electronic copy of this book for review purposes. I was not otherwise compensated for this post and all thoughts and opinions are my own. 

The protagonist of the book is Rachel. She is Irish and is a nurse. She is driving home from visiting her in laws one March day. Her husband Tom is driving; he has been suffering from depression for a while. Their two children, a boy and a girl, are in the back of the car. They are four and almost three. Tom drives the car off the road, intending to kill all four of them. 

The narrative goes backwards and forwards in time, showing Rachel very soon after the 'incident' and then further on in her life when she has managed to put herself back together and forge a new life for herself, even though it looks really different from the life she had planned out. Then it also goes back in time to when Rachel and Tom first met, and their relationship and marriage, having their children, and Tom's illness and how that came about. 

It isn't clear to begin with whether Tom has survived or not, so I don't really want to spoil that. The narrative is told in little vignettes, so it isn't straightfoward prose at all. There were a few times when I really wanted to know more - for instance, there's a part where Rachel gives an interview to someone, and I would really have liked to see the aftermath of that, but no, we then go backwards in time to see what's happening in the past. But for me that's really the sign of a good novel, that I really want to know more. 

I really think this book is going to go viral once it's out. It is going to get everyone talking - what would YOU do? How would you survive? It's the type of book to definitely be picked for a Richard and Judy book club type of thing, and for good reason. It is beautiful about grief and doesn't flinch away from it. It's brutal about living with someone with a severe mental illness (something I have a lot of personal experience with). But it is also so beautiful. Rachel does manage to make a new life for herself but she also has to make new relationships with her family; her parents, who love her but are removed from her, and her sister Rebecca, who has been wayward in the past but who has two children only slightly older than Rachel's. There's stuff in the past about her relationships with her in laws and with Tom, of course. 

The children aren't named in the book which I actually really liked - they're known more by their attributes then than anything else. I thought this was a really effective way of writing a book. I've read that Claire Gleeson is a short story writer primarily and I think that really shows, but I really do hope she writes another novel in the future as I would really like to read something else by her. I'm giving this four out of five.