An Embarrassment of Riches Book

My review on Amazon:

Gerald Hansen has written a whole book. It's not often that a book catches with characters that seem almost novelties at first and with prose that delves into setting and situation with such deftness. That he maintains the hilarity while weaving an undercurrent of contemporary temptation and its outcomes, is nothing short of a feat.

The impetuousness of the Flood family, Ursula's attempts to revive love from her relatives with her lottery win, surge with a pathos that covers both a raucous younger generation and the older generation's obsessions with gain. The orchestrations of Siofra's confirmation dress, her brother's street drugs and police informing, Dymphna's schemes for her child to have a Catholic father, somehow don't overwhelm the confessions of their mother and Ursula's investigation of Jed wasting the lottery money.

This is a book you decide to finish early on and, surprisingly, the laughs and the amazement come more frequently in the latter third of it. And you find yourself waiting for certain members of the Flood family to appear again because, while there's hostility in this, you've come to care about some of them.

I took an Irish Literature course in school and the genre Tragi-Comedy came into the discussions. This is definitely in that tradition.