Thirst Trap - Gráinne O’Hare
If this book were on a 0–5 scale, I’d give it a 10, because numbers are fake and so are rules.
Three young women in Belfast are partying, deflecting, and stumbling through messy love and work lives, while avoiding the grief and guilt of losing the fourth member of their once‑inseparable friend group. A year after the accident, they’re still running from adulthood, the future, and the truth about what happened.
Now…where to begin? Gràinne O’Hare’s writing is so good it should be illegal. The prose? Gorgeous. The humour? Sharp enough to cut me. The characters? Chaotic little disasters I would absolutely follow into poor decisions. It’s a chaotic yet blissfully beautiful story, written in a humorous way without ruining the tragic parts of the narrative. Honestly, I can’t think of a better way this could’ve been written. Gràinne O’Hare has outdone herself — I loved every bit of this novel, from the first word to the last.
O’Hare’s writing style blends the perfect prose elements together, concocting this compelling book that had me turning every page, pulled through her characters’ lives like I was a magnet and the pages were sheets of iron. I also loved how raw she painted each of the girls’ lives, and how believable they all were — painfully believable at times, which is my favourite kind. She was just so descriptive, interweaving funny metaphors and idioms to keep me engaged alongside the characters’ thoughts, and all their super interesting relationships with all the different side characters O’Hare put in there to move the story along. Ugh…it was just brilliant.
It’s sharp and contemporary, which I always admire, and very Belfast‑specific… which also seems to be something I’m naturally drawn to. There’s something about Irish writers that pleases me more than anything, and I’m not sure if it’s because Irish culture is foreign to me — I’ve never been to Ireland — and the way it’s depicted completely enraptures me; or if I simply love the personalities of these writers, which shine through their novels with an obvious amount of their heart and soul in every phrase and clause. Perhaps it’s both, but either way, I can’t get enough of it, and I will be reading this again.
Aimée Walsh and her book ‘Exile’ (a review on that can be found much further back on my book review homepage) was the first Irish novelist I read, and Gràinne O’Hare certainly won’t be my last… not after reading the masterpieces these two have created.
Not to mention O’Hare’s character work, which is incredible. Her protagonists are flawed, deeply human, and — if I’ve said this word before I’m sorry — chaotic. I love a character who just lives their life brazenly with all the emotion. It’s what keeps me reading a lot of these Contemporary, Humorous/Dark Comedy, and LGBTQ+ / Sapphic Fiction books. If I don’t like a character, for whatever reason, you’ve lost me at page one, to be honest. I want to feel excited by them, I want to dislike them for some of the human decisions they make, and I want to feel like I know them — and O’Hare’s Thirst Trap does just that.
From the start, I knew these girls had troubled lives, and that alone gave me the desire to know more. Can you tell I love a good disaster?
Furthermore, I want to share my love for female‑driven novels. A lot of the things I write are from female perspectives, and sometimes I pick up a book solely because I want to read about the lives of women. I’m often disappointed when a book is written from a male point of view. I love and relate to women a lot more than I do men, and I’m sure a lot of other girls and women out there do too — and this sort of book nails that desire on the head. It’s perfect for getting lost in a woman’s world, and because of that, I’ll be reading it again in the near future for both validation and pure enjoyment because why not?
So, if you love messy women, Irish humour, and emotional chaos, this is your book, honey. It’s perfect for anyone who feels a lot but uses jocularity to get through it — basically, anyone who wants something they can genuinely connect with while still feeling a little bit of warmth along the way. I mean, I felt for these girls the whole way through this short portion of their lives, and I found myself rooting for them and getting riled up at every bit of mistreatment they faced. If that’s not a sign telling you Thirst Trap is definitely a good book to invest in, then I don’t know what to tell you…
Buy your copy of the novel here!: https://amzn.eu/d/0aUqaj5T
No seriously…buy it. Please.