Soul is democratic, Jimmy. Anyone with a bin lid can play it. It's the people's music . . . Jazz has got no soul. It is sound for the sake of sound. It has no meaning. It's musical wanking, Brother." Knox, Kirsty Blake (27 November 2013). "Inside story: Roddy Doyle's got the Guts for awards glory". Irish Independent . Retrieved 27 November 2013. An Irish family, the Rabbittes, have to work around the pregnancy of the oldest daughter, a new dog, and how everyone adapts to the situation. The dad is the numero uno character: highly lovable and really funny. It is a busy family with neighbors and friends dropping in enhancing the craziness and mayhem around the daughter who refuse to make the sperm donor known. ( I have a good reason for calling the sleaze bag, who got the girl pregnant, the sperm donor!) Doyle doubts his influence has been so profound. “There was the thing that there was going to be this whole raft of Roddy Doyle writers because of the success of the first three, four books. There are plenty of people who write about life in working-class Ireland but I don’t see them as overly inspired by me.” Another thing I adored was how absolutely I felt I understood each and every one of his characters. Nuance of action and dialogue make them all undeniably unique, and yet they also provide an illuminating insight to the culture they are representing. This is Doyle's forte, and his characters are what made for such an enjoyable and hilarious reading experience.

Sharon Rabbitte – the eldest daughter and the protagonist of the second novel, The Snapper, in which she comes to terms with her pregnancy and later gives birth to a daughter, Georgina (whom the family call "Gina" for short). Written in the local Irish vernacular, the dialogue is extremely salty, and may offend those who are intolerant of the frequent use of the f_ and c_ words.A band created by working-class guys is trying to bring soul music to Dublin, in Ireland. They called it the music of people. I see, I am reading a lot of Irish stuff these days, a few weeks ago, I was reading Seamus Heaney. And I noticed that I have liked almost everything Irish so far. Maslin, Janet (14 August 1991). "Review/Film; How American Soul Music Conquered Dublin". The New York Times . Retrieved 4 July 2016. This was a little more work than I thought it was going to be, given its almost entirely dialogue ( 50 % actual dialogue and 50% she said, he said, and - ). It's good though, rapid even. It just seems like I have forgotten how to read a book like this, where the characters have the kind of bantering nonsense conversations of everyday life rather than simply being used as pawns to make a grand point or to drive a plot forward. When Jimmy Senior's friend Brendan, known to all as Bimbo, is made redundant Jimmy's mood is lifted as he gets to have some company to fill the long and lonely days. When Bimbo's redundancy cheque arrives Bimbo has an idea and the two friends embarked on an unlikely business venture. This is the second instalment in Doyle's The Barrytown trilogy, following on from The Commitments. The focus has shifted to the former protagonist's father and elder sister, and details another generation of life inside suburban Ireland.

As for The Van? I loved spending time with these characters. Jimmy and Bimbo’s night on the town sequence is one for the ages: so real and vivid it was at times hard to read. (I felt so protective of these characters I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.) Darren is the younger son, who is an accomplished pupil – he would at a later stage take seven top marks in all the seven tests he gives, paving the way to university, if only the parents can afford that, which is an added torment for the protagonist, when he has to ponder over the strained relationship he will have at that point with his best friend, for if he is to look for the exit, then Darren would be unable to continue to study at University, and his father will be in the same spot we found him at the start of The Van.

The Commitments (1991)". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on 3 March 2021 . Retrieved 15 September 2020.

Sharon Rabbitte is pregnant. But the juicy gossip around town isn't her unwed status but concerns over who the father is. Is it her best friend's balding, overweight father like is rumoured? Or the one-night-stand Sharon claims it is? And why does it matter either way? For Sharon it matters little. For her father, it is the world. A short, sweet tale of the birth and short life of an Irish soul band, full of humor and exhilaration. It feels like that sense of delicious surprise at being able to skate on thin ice. Young Jimmy Rabbitte, unemployed resident of a fictional working class neighborhood of Dublin, Barrytown, gets the brilliant idea that Ireland needs sex machine music like James Brown’s. We get the pleasure of his imagination at work as he puts together his band one by one and works up a repertoire of songs. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr., a minor character in The Commitments, and a major one in The Snapper, has been laid off and is trying to fill his days with babysitting his granddaughter Gina, going to the library, and watching people go by his North Dublin home. The novel follows the formation of teenage band, The Commitments: through the choosing of band members, the finessing of performance, the highs from the shared passion for music, and the lows after the inevitable in-band clashes. This novel's entire focus is on music, and how it can enrich one's soul and move you, emotionally, the way no other can.

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Lots of Irish slang and written to capture some of the accent. This trilogy centers around the Rabbitte family. Each book has a different tone, which was interesting to me since the bulk of the story is conveyed in oddly formatted dialogue. Why is that interesting at all? I struggle to write beyond mere summarizations so I get overexcited when I think I recognize the craft in writing.