The Beauty of Impossible Things is not easy to classify. It relates events from a single scorching summer thirty years ago, when Natasha was fifteen and living with her beautiful, bohemian and unworldly mother in a ramshackle old house above an Irish seaside town. In this regard it might be called a coming-of-age story but it covers a range of themes beyond that. The mother-daughter relationship is the pivot around which Rachel Donohue explores the angst which accompanies the transition from child to young adult. The notion of identity is considered and how we deal with our sense of ourselves alongside the pain of otherness and how far we will go in our desire to belong. This is a gentle, slow-moving, character-driven book; haunting and melancholic, elegiac. At times the book takes on a summer gothic quality. The sense of place is strong and emotions are finely drawn.

The structure of the book is refreshingly simple. It is not all introspection. There is a story involving a mystery, a disappearance and jealousy. Natasha recalls the summer as a middle-aged woman, bringing back the memories at the suggestion of her therapist. This provides an additional layer as older Natasha observes and remarks on those long-ago events and reflects on her own behaviour as an unusual child at a difficult moment in her life. This is a book of longing and regret.

Understated and beautifully written, this is a quiet novel. It still lingers with me and will do so for a while. I would happily read more from Rachel Donohue and will seek out her earlier book. My thanks to Net Galley and Atlantic Books for the ARC of this book in exchange for an independent and unbiased review.