Despite its cold title, Louise Nealon’s Snowflake is a warm-hearted book: several degrees warmer, in fact, than the work of Sally Rooney, to which it has already been compared. The Rooney comparisons aren’t totally unwarranted: Snowflake is, after all, a novel about a young woman from rural Ireland encountering the pretensions and sophistications of Trinity College Dublin. But that’s just content. Stylistically and formally, Nealon is very much her own thing. Snowflake is intimate, chatty, immensely readable. There’s an original and distinctive voice here, and a strong sense of character and place.
The narrator is Debbie White, who grows up on a dairy farm in Kildare near a village that is “little more than an intersection of lost roads bumping into each other”. Debbie doesn’t