Inside The Whale by Jennie Rooney

Such a simple story. Two people meet, fall in love, plan a future. But then something happens that separates them, that changes the courses of both their lives for good.

It’s been done before. It will doubtlessly be done again. But Jennie Rooney’s debut novel does it particularly well.

The story really is that simple, but the joy is in the execution.

The story is told by the two main characters, Stevie and Michael, in alternate chapters. And it moves backwards and forwards in time. We first meet Stevie as a young woman at home with her mother and Michael as an elderly man in a care home.

Often that wouldn’t work but here it does, because this isn’t a book about plot, it’s a book about two lives that met. The shifts in focus made it natural think about the two lives lived rather than a sequence of events that happened.

I warmed to Stevie immediately, and in the early part of the book I missed her in Michael’s chapters. But as I learned more about him I grew to care for him too, and the pages turned more and more quickly.

The meeting and the development of the relationship was completely natural and right. But was separated them, and its consequences kept them apart.

I felt joy, pain love, grief, so many emotions with Stevie and Michael over the courses of their lives, and I miss them now they are gone.

Yes it is a simple tale, but Jennie Rooney tells it so well and presents just the right moments, just the right details to make it wonderfully effective: a very human story of love, life and family told with great warmth and wit.

There’s not quite enough there to make this a great book, but it is a lovely debut from an author who clearly has the potential to write something great.

I shall definitely be looking out for her second novel.