Posted: February 27th, 2025

Rating: 6/10

Genre: Literary fiction

Summary: It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Review:

This was not a book I expected to pick up. I saw it randomly in my Hoopla and decided to read it during choir practice. It was recommended to me on a random post on my instagram for you page, and the person essentially said that it was really sad and thought-provoking. It was not.

Now don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad book by any means! The writing/prose is enjoyable and the main character, Bill Furlong, is perfectly likeable. However, it's dull. To be frank, this book was much shorter than I thought it would be, like this is a novella. I thought it was a novel. If you're going to write something this short, at least make it punch-y.

It was like we were given a setting and a character but no real plot. This book is about Magdalen laundries (kinda) but it doesn't really delve into them, nor does it say anything hard hitting about them. Bill spends most of the book reminiscing about his childhood, how his mother could have been one of the girls in the Magdalen laundries and worrying about what to do about it. The women in this story, his wife Eileen, Mrs. Kehoe and the Mother Superior, all seem so much more knowledgable about what's going on and yet none of it gets shared with the reader beyond, them warning Bill to not get too involved or it might affect his standing in the community. Maybe if someone who knew more about Ireland and Magdalen laundries was reading about this, this would make more sense but I, an American whose parents are immigrants who don't speak English well, don't know anything about them.

On another point, this was supposedly set in the 80s but I didn't realize that until like chapter 4 where a TV was mentioned. Maybe this is because I'm young and don't know how the 80's were like in Ireland but this definitely gave me more 'Little House on the Prairie' vibes than 80s.

The more I think about this book, the more it goes down in rating, hah! I will admit the last chapter was the best mostly because Bill actually did something and there was a bit where he talked about how could you be a Christian if you didn't do anything when you saw injustice in the world. I agree with that quite strongly. However, I'm reading a fanfiction that updated last week and had this passage in it:

“Because good people have a responsibility to stop bad things from happening,” he says, quiet, and when Fox goes still, Agen leans forward, sets his cup down gently on the table. “It is one of the things that makes us good people. We take on the burden of upholding the society that we wish to be part of. It is not right, that others would break that compact, but it is on us as people who live in this world, who uphold the rules, to correct things when they stray from the paths we find acceptable.” -ch 24 of eastward and moon white (soft-petaled wounds) by blackkat on ao3

And to be quite frank, that passage right there accomplishes what this book was trying to say but much more strongly and directly. Don't get me wrong, Small Things Like These isn't a bad book by any means, but it didn't do much for me. I'm currently at a point in my life where I'm already sad and depressed, where I feel disempowered and beaten down on. Maybe if I was in a different part of my life, it'd hit stronger but currently -no. It was good, but the main message didn't resonate with me. I will say it was very 'gloomy aesthetic' though.