Waiting on Wednesday (#90)

"Waiting on" Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases.

Asking For It by Louise O'Neill

Expected publication:  September 3rd 2015 by QuercusChildrens

FROM THE WINNER OF THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR AWARD.

It's the beginning of the summer in a small town in Ireland. Emma O'Donovan is eighteen years old, beautiful, happy, confident.

One night, there's a party. Everyone is there. All eyes are on Emma.

The next morning, she wakes on the front porch of her house. She can't remember what happened, she doesn't know how she got there.

She doesn't know why she's in pain.

But everyone else does. Photographs taken at the party show, in explicit detail, what happened to Emma that night.

But sometimes people don't want to believe what is right in front of them, especially when the truth concerns the town's heroes...

One reason. It's Louise O'Neill. I loved Only Ever Yours (which is currently only £2.84 on Amazon) so obviously, I'm going to read anything she writes.

What're you waiting on?

Only Ever Yours Blog Tour: A Q&A with Louise O'Neill

Firstly, Happy Book Birthday Louise O'Neill, Only Ever Yours is released today and I can honestly say it is one of my favourites of 2014 so far. It's one of those books everyone should read, it's brutally honest and will have you thinking for a while, as it did with me. You can find my review of it here. Thanks to Quercus I also got a chance to do a Q&A with Louise herself, so on with the  show!

 

     Only Ever Yours
Author: Louise O'Neill

      Publication Date: July 3rd 2014        

      Publisher: Quercus  

   In a world in which baby girls are no longer born naturally, women are bred in schools, trained in the arts of pleasing men until they are ready for the outside world. At graduation, the most highly rated girls become “companions”, permitted to live with their husbands and breed sons until they are no longer useful.

For the girls left behind, the future – as a concubine or a teacher – is grim.

Best friends Freida and Isabel are sure they’ll be chosen as companions – they are among the most highly rated girls in their year.

But as the intensity of final year takes hold, Isabel does the unthinkable and starts to put on weight. ..
And then, into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride.

Freida must fight for her future – even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known…   

 Q&A

1)    Did religion have an effect on the way women are perceived in Only Ever Yours?

      That’s interesting, that’s the second time someone has asked me this question this week. I didn’t consciously decide that religion would be a factor in the way women are perceived in Only Ever Yours, I felt that the world in which the novel is set was much more likely to have been created because our patriarchal society posits that men are far more inherently valuable than women. However, I was raised a Catholic, and attended a convent primary and secondary school. I was extremely devout when I was a child, and I guess it was only with hindsight that I began to think there was something rather strange about being indoctrinated in a religion that presents the ‘ideal woman’ as a mother who has never had sex.