A wonderful novel, a moment in time caught by Mark B. McCaffery who transports us back fifty years to how adolescence and angst was for Barry-Joe, an inquisitive kid, learning the rules in drab, bleak Portadown, 1971, where Catholics are expected to know their place. His survival mechanism is his innocence, his dry wit and his innate honesty. On top of all that he is charmed and elevated by the fact that the nightly newsreader on local BBC is his namesake, Larry McCoubrey, whom he privately addresses and assesses, appreciating Larry’s distress in having to increasingly report the growing horrors of the conflict in the North of Ireland.