Infinite Sky: A Review

 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

When Iris’ mum leaves home, her brother Sam goes off the rails and her dad is left trying to hold it all together. So when a family of travellers sets up camp illegally in front of their farm, it’s the catalyst for a stand-off that can only end in disaster. But to Iris it’s an adventure. She secretly strikes up a friendship with the gypsy boy, Trick, and discovers that home can be something as simple as a carved-out space in a field full of corn…

 

Infinite Sky is the debut novel of C.J. Flood. A coming-of-age story, it follows 13-year-old Iris as she is attempting to adjust to life after her mother has left. As a result, her dad has started drinking more and is becoming more distant, and her older brother Sam is becoming increasingly withdrawn from the family. Their mother’s departure has left the family struggling with many aspects of their lives, as the house has become increasingly neglected, and Sam and Iris have fallen out with their best friends. Iris’s friend, Matty, and her mother are smothering Iris with their well-intentioned support which results in the girls falling out. Sam, on the other hand, has fallen out with his lifelong best friend, Benji, and has started hanging out with a new group of friends known for starting fist fights and carrying knives. 

 

As the Dancy family dealing with their own issues, a family of Irish travellers illegally move onto the land in their farm. Iris’ father and brother want them gone and are less than welcoming. Iris, however, strikes up an unexpected friendship with Trick, the fourteen-year-old son of the Irish travellers. This friendship causes friction between Iris and the rest of her family when they find out, largely due to Trick being an Irish traveller. Iris and Trick’s relationship is more than just a friendship, its intertwined with first love. And with it being a first love, Iris feels the intense need to protect and stand up for Trick and his family against her dad, who is actively trying to evict Trick’s family off of his farm. Both her father and brother are prejudiced against the Irish travellers, repeatedly calling them slurs and pedalling stereotypes. Sam’s new friends are also prejudiced towards Trick’s family and are shown to become increasingly violent towards them as the books progresses. The violence reaches boiling point involving all of the characters and ends in a truly tragic event, which is hinted during the prologue with the final line:

“And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?”

Infinite Sky is a beautifully written book that tackles the themes of love, friendship, family, racism, prejudice, and so much more. There are no prefect characters in this book, with all of them having flaws that contribute to them being morally bad characters at points. This particularly applies to Sam and his father. Sam has been negatively affected by his mother leaving the family and this causes him to make some bad decisions, from drinking heavily to starting fights with his friends to falling in with the wrong crowd to being involved in a number of crimes. He is acting out in anger at his mother, who has abandoned him in his eyes. Iris and Sam’s father has reacted by drinking more and more both at home and at the local pub in order to cope with his wife’s departure. He also becomes fixated on evicting and removing the Delaney family from his land, and threatens repeatedly to call the police on them, going so far as to blame them for a crime that was committed on his property. C.J. Flood has created characters that, while they are flawed, the reader sympathises with on some levels. She depicts the local attitudes towards the Irish traveller family candidly and includes the use of the slurs that are commonly used by the general public to discriminate against the community. C.J. Flood never apologises for the characters’ actions within the book, showing how they all have played a part in the tragic event that occurs at the end. The book is heart-breaking but also the actions and attitudes of the characters are realistic and not so far-fetched.

 

I recommend this book to all, not just the young adults that it’s aimed at. The book handles issues that are still prevalent in society today and echoes many attitudes that some people still have about the Irish traveller community. This book made me sob at the end and surprised me even though you are warned of a sad ending at the very beginning. 

 

Until next time, I’ll continue reading with wanderlust. 

              📚🧳✈️🗺