Fíona Scarlett’s 2021 debut novel, Boys Don’t Cry, focused on the pressures of life in working-class Dublin. This, her second novel, stays in the same territory and tells the story of Shauna, a middle-aged woman who runs the local hair salon in a Dublin suburb called Hoodstown. When we meet her at the beginning of her working day, we know it’s going to be a difficult one, but we don’t yet know why.
The story is told in a dual timeline, with chapters alternating between Shauna’s day at work, and her life in the past, growing up alongside her best friends Dylan, Mark and Pam. As the friends move through their adolescence and begin to dream about their futures, a catastrophic change in Shauna’s circumstances puts her life on a different course. Another girl gets “stuck”, while a few “get out”, and these storylines highlight how precarious lives without safety nets, or hope, can be.
Scarlett is clearly a novelist of enormous potential, balancing a love story of huge emotion with observations about class, and at the same time maintaining a sense of mystery that leads to a powerful emotional climax.
My one difficulty with the book was that the fragmented style of the writing is not a natural fit for such a big, emotional story. (Two books that came to mind for me while reading this were Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You and Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook.) We often get snatches of Shauna’s thoughts, while dialogue is attributed in an unorthodox way, which gives the book a slightly broken rhythm that takes a while to get into. All that said, once I settled into the rhythm, the story took over and I found it hard to put down.
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This is a coming-of-age story and a love story, but it is also an examination of how difficult it is to follow your dreams when faced with the brutal weight of familial duty, lack of opportunity and lack of support. At one point, Shauna’s mother says, “everyone needs dreams”, and it feels like she’s stating the central point of the novel. May All Your Skies Be Blue is an insightful retort to that statement, reminding us that in order to dream, people must first have hope, and in order to have hope, they must first have help.
