I was blown away by this review in the Italian magazine ‘Satisfiction’.

“McVeigh chooses the first person of Mickey Donnelly, a hyper-intelligent, hypersensitive, hyper-ironic child, raised in a poor, Catholic family, crushed by his alcoholic father, violent brothers, the civil war that enters the house like a constant smell. Mickey is not a “poor child”, he is a narrative machine. A comic-tragic device that uses imagination as a weapon of survival. The tongue that laughs while bleeding is the real protagonist. The novel is crossed by a central and devastating humiliation, the end of the promise of social mobility. The brilliant boy will not be able to go to the “right” school because the family cannot afford it. There is no more political scene than this. No proclamation, no ideology but the naked reality of a class that remains in its place. McVeigh doesn’t explain: he shows. And it’s much worse.”

The Good Son is a ferocious book because it does not promise that intelligence will save us or that goodness will be rewarded but tells the birth of a conscience in an environment that rejects it. It is a novel about the origin of disillusionment, about the exact moment you understand that the world is not built around you. A dirty, funny and cruel book that, once closed, leaves you with the feeling of having survived something that should not have been told so well.”

You can read the review here.