Frances Molloy died tragically young, soon after she had started to write, and she's mainly remembered for this cheeky autobiographical novel, the story of a clever and assertive girl from a poor and over-large Catholic family in a small town in Northern Ireland who manages to build a life for herself through a series of comical and humiliating failures. Things go badly for Ann Elizabeth McGlone, whether she's trying to be a nun, a factory worker, a nurse, a housekeeper or a political activist. But the self-deprecating comedy and the stylised Northern Ireland dialect in which the book is written (as a kind of precursor to Milkman) don't take anything away from her hard-hitting satire of the flaws of sixties Ireland, North and South of the border. It's perhaps not quite as raw as The white bird passes, but very much in the same tradition. ( )