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An Embarrassment of Riches Gerald Hansen 9780595447596 Books

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An Embarrassment of Riches Gerald Hansen 9780595447596 Books

This book is the first in a series of comic novels that have to do with the struggles between Fionnulua Flood and her upwardly mobile sister, Ursula Barnett, after the latter has won a lottery. Fionnuala thinks she is entitled to some of the money, and the resulting shenanigans that she and her family put themselves through are tragicomic and will keep you chortling on every page. The Hatfields and McCoys had nothing on these two, except for the guns!

I have to admit, I first bought a copy of the second sequel, "Fleeing the Jurisdiction" for the Kindle because it was priced low enough that I didn't worry too much about losing money on a book that I wouldn't like, but after reading the book I was immediately drawn to purchasing the prequels "An Embarrassment of Riches" and "Hand in the Till", so that I'd have a complete set of the Gerald Hansen "Flood Family Saga". I haven't read anything so funny and (unfortunately) true to life in years! I even bought a couple of extra copies, as I tend to loan books out to friends and relatives when I think it's merited. My cousin, a retired Advanced Placement English teacher, enjoyed them also. She especially was captivated by the use of dialect in the stories. Even though I'd never been exposed to "Derry/Bogside Irish" before, I picked it up quite easily after the first few pages. In a way it reminded me of "Nadsat" in Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange"--but in no way as hard to pick up.

There may be some wowsers out there that think that stories about such rascals as the Floods and Barnetts aren't fit subjects for literature, (Aussie Slang: Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder) but to them I would answer with a few other "relatively unknown" writers who used the same picaresque subject matter and approach: Cervantes. Fielding. Voltaire. Twain. Bellow. Grass. Hansen mines a great tradition and puts his own touches to it.

For those that downloaded "An Embarrassment of Riches" while it was a freebie on Amazon last week, you got a fun read for free! If it wasn't to your taste, well, sometimes, like Heinlein once wrote, "Anything free is worth what you paid for it"! Going by the number of stars given in the ratings, I think you find yourself in the minority.

Take a flyer on this ebook! For less than the cost of a cup of overpriced brand name coffee, you can be smiling for days. The Floods, to use an expression familiar to people living in the Chesapeake Bay area, are like a bushel of crabs all trying to scrabble up the sides to escape, but holding each other back in the process!


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An Embarrassment of Riches Gerald Hansen 9780595447596 Books Reviews

It seemed like it was supposed to be funny but I found it rather depressing. Every character was an awful person. I kept expecting some hilarity but never really got it. Humor is so subjective. That said, I thought it was well written and the dialect definitely added interest.
There was nothing about this book I didn't like I thought it was hilarious. exactly the way low class people in this part of the world act. I would love to read the sequel.
The lives of the Floods are torn to shreds with the good fortune of a lottery win for one sibling and her cowboy of a husband. I loved this book, I really did. It opens in the court room so you know, right from the get-go the direction this is going. The backstory of the lives of the Floods, goes from bad to worse and would but the fear of all the Gods in you and you will come away thanking them for the family you have and not be born into the likes of this one.

Gerald Hansen has written a well crafted, tightly woven gem of a book, it has drama (buckets of it) comedy, you'll laugh at some of the events that are as sad as they are funny, so much so, you might wonder if it is possible for a family to be this dysfunctional (think Shameless) but Hansen's dialog and dialect are so authentic and tight you are with these characters 100%.

The climactic ending was a chaos of events that made me vow never to visit that part of the North, but then I remembered. It's just fiction, right?! Brilliantly done. It'll be on the look out for more from Gerald.
Gerald Hansen has written a whole book. It's not often that a book catches with characters that seem almost novelties at first and with prose that delves into setting and situation with such deftness. That he maintains the hilarity while weaving an undercurrent of contemporary temptation and its outcomes, is nothing short of a feat.

The impetuousness of the Flood family, Ursula's attempts to revive love from her relatives with her lottery win, surge with a pathos that covers both a raucous younger generation and the older generation's obsessions with gain. The orchestrations of Siofra's confirmation dress, her brother's street drugs and police informing, Dymphna's schemes for her child to have a Catholic father, somehow don't overwhelm the confessions of their mother and Ursula's investigation of Jed wasting the lottery money.

This is a book you decide to finish early on and, surprisingly, the laughs and the amazement come more frequently in the latter third of it. And you find yourself waiting for certain members of the Flood family to appear again because, while there's hostility in this, you've come to care about some of them.

I took an Irish Literature course in school and the genre Tragi-Comedy came into the discussions. This is definitely in that tradition.
Thinking this book would be a light, easy and funny relief from some of the books I'd been recently reading I ordered it as a free book. Although there were funny parts I found an abundance of the things poverty encourages people into doing that are both illegal and immoral. It showed rather convincingly how a life style is passed on from one generation to another and how greed can change one's outlook from one that should be thankful to one that is suspicious and entitled. Although the main characters are Catholic, as am I, I was not bothered by this aspect until the end where highly unlikely things happened within a sacramental ceremony in the church. The ending was abrupt and left you wondering about Ursurla's life from then on. Also, written in a low class Irish dialog made reading slow until you adapted to it. Despite the humor I found this book depressing.
This book is the first in a series of comic novels that have to do with the struggles between Fionnulua Flood and her upwardly mobile sister, Ursula Barnett, after the latter has won a lottery. Fionnuala thinks she is entitled to some of the money, and the resulting shenanigans that she and her family put themselves through are tragicomic and will keep you chortling on every page. The Hatfields and McCoys had nothing on these two, except for the guns!

I have to admit, I first bought a copy of the second sequel, "Fleeing the Jurisdiction" for the because it was priced low enough that I didn't worry too much about losing money on a book that I wouldn't like, but after reading the book I was immediately drawn to purchasing the prequels "An Embarrassment of Riches" and "Hand in the Till", so that I'd have a complete set of the Gerald Hansen "Flood Family Saga". I haven't read anything so funny and (unfortunately) true to life in years! I even bought a couple of extra copies, as I tend to loan books out to friends and relatives when I think it's merited. My cousin, a retired Advanced Placement English teacher, enjoyed them also. She especially was captivated by the use of dialect in the stories. Even though I'd never been exposed to "Derry/Bogside Irish" before, I picked it up quite easily after the first few pages. In a way it reminded me of "Nadsat" in Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange"--but in no way as hard to pick up.

There may be some wowsers out there that think that stories about such rascals as the Floods and Barnetts aren't fit subjects for literature, (Aussie Slang Wowser an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder) but to them I would answer with a few other "relatively unknown" writers who used the same picaresque subject matter and approach Cervantes. Fielding. Voltaire. Twain. Bellow. Grass. Hansen mines a great tradition and puts his own touches to it.

For those that downloaded "An Embarrassment of Riches" while it was a freebie on last week, you got a fun read for free! If it wasn't to your taste, well, sometimes, like Heinlein once wrote, "Anything free is worth what you paid for it"! Going by the number of stars given in the ratings, I think you find yourself in the minority.

Take a flyer on this ebook! For less than the cost of a cup of overpriced brand name coffee, you can be smiling for days. The Floods, to use an expression familiar to people living in the Chesapeake Bay area, are like a bushel of crabs all trying to scrabble up the sides to escape, but holding each other back in the process!