JUNO LOVES LEGS

A twisted coming-of age-story concerning two young outsiders unable and unwilling to fit into the narrow confines of their small Irish village or, later, into more sophisticated Dublin.

Geary uses gorgeous prose, full of Irish lilt and hard-edged slang, to describe bleak childhoods as harsh as any found in a Dickens novel. When 12-year-old Juno first meets Legs, their crises at home and school veer close to clichés about the downtrodden: There are Juno’s useless alcoholic father and worn-down seamstress mother whose clients seldom pay; Legs’ absent father and rigid mother ready to send him to a “special” school to cure him of his sinful artistic effeminacy; hostile classmates who shun Juno for her poverty and Legs for his otherness; the priest in charge of the school who beats and humiliates them. Juno and Legs establish their bond after she stands up for him against playground bullies and he distracts the priest with misbehavior to protect her from mortification in the classroom. Narrator Juno takes up most of the emotional space here, showing in detail her troubled mix of good intentions, self-destructive combativeness, and constant sense of guilt. Juno’s longings tend to erupt in spur-of-the-moment acts—breaking a neighbor’s flowerpot, punching someone’s nose, taking her first drink—that make her life worse. Seen only through Juno’s eyes, Legs is harder to read because Juno knows only what he tells her. Then an explosion of Legs' rage against the priest leads to years of forced separation from Juno. Even when they reconnect in Dublin, where Legs, now a member of the artistic demimonde, takes in Juno, who is on the skids, he remains enigmatic until a rush of last-minute revelations. Inescapable poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, the unnamed “plague” frightening gay Dubliners in the 1980s—much of the novel is almost unbearably grim, making the occasional glimpses of real kindness Juno and Legs experience that much more poignant.

An evocative, effective dive into dark if too familiar waters.