I was originally excited to read a selection from the "Irish-American grapples with their identity in relation to the Catholic Church" canon, but this fell flat for me. I often feel a little bad when I don't love an acclaimed book. However, this book is so ridiculously wordy and dense that I don't feel too bad. It reads like my 7th grade essays right after I found out how to abuse every synonym in the thesaurus. Random example I pulled from toward the beginning of the book:

...her emulative spirit warmed slowly to our admiration: ... and though for expedient reasons she could not afford to deprecate them... a sense of her own finer magnanimity disposed her subtly in our favour.