Read A Greyhound of a Girl free in the Little Reads app.
Roddy Doyle's A Greyhound of a Girl is a story for 10 year olds about a cheeky Dublin girl, a granny who is dying, and a woman under the chestnut trees who should not be there.
Mary O'Hara, aged twelve, walks home up a long steep hill under the trees. Today she walks it on her own, because her best friend Ava moved across the city yesterday.
Mary did try to sort it out. She put a deal to Ava's parents. Let Ava live at ours and think of the savings on food.
They said no. Mary told them this was stupid, which it is, then went home, cried, and ate until her face was stiff. Heartbreak and hunger turning up together is one of the truest things in the book.
Her granny is poorly as well. Nobody is saying very much about that yet.
Then a woman speaks to her from behind one of the trees. She is dressed like somebody out of an old film, big boots and all. It is pouring, and not one bit of her is wet.
She knows about Mary's granny. She knows Mary's name. She flickers for a second, like somebody stepping behind a sheet of clear plastic, and then she is solid again.
Mary ought to be terrified. She isn't, quite. There is something about this woman she nearly recognises.
The voice is the joy of it. Mary is all "like" and "whatever" and completely straight-faced logic. She has been told never to talk to strangers, so she points out that her parents were strangers to each other once, and by that rule the human race would have died out. She decides to become a chef, and works out you have to manage chef before you can manage world famous.
Her mum Scarlett speaks entirely in exclamation marks. Mary tells her so.
The book is about dying, though, and it does not dodge that. The granny at the centre of it is dying, and everything else is built around that fact. There is a ghost, but she is kind rather than frightening. If you've got a reader who has lost a grandparent lately, or is watching one get frailer, some of this will sit very close to home. If they are ready for it, it is warm and funny and full of the women in one family going back a long way, and Mary is far too busy being cheeky to stay gloomy for long.
For another girl who is certain the dead have not entirely gone, Where the Lost Ones Go has Eliot in a new house that smells of lemons, carrying a gadget for detecting ghosts and missing a grandmother whose kitchen smelled of curry and peppermint.
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