In the follow-up to his Costa-shortlisted debut Montpelier Parade, Karl Geary returns once more to 1980s Dublin with a coming-of-age story about an unlikely relationship, set against a landscape of poverty, unrest and unbelonging. When misfit Juno, as handy with her fists as she is with her backchat, defends fellow outsider Legs against the school bullies, it spawns a fast friendship, giving both teenagers an escape from their troubled lives: Legs from his germophobic and homophobic mother, and Juno from a fractured family home where a working lightbulb travels from room to room, yet her da always finds money for the pub. “They were two mouths and I was their ear,” says Juno of her warring parents.
Juno Loves Legs is the story of that friendship, in its many incarnations, as seen through the eyes of Juno. As the teenagers move beyond the quiet cruelties of a Catholic education, and into an even darker and seemingly crueller world, against the odds their friendship endures. It has to. Severed from their families by mutual agreement, in a new life littered with sordid squats and deep prejudice, transient figures and seedy bars, they rely on each other to survive. The whip-smart exchanges, the bravado, the vulnerability, all are captured perfectly on the page. While squatting in a council flat, Juno watches Legs shuffle down to the little red phone box outside, wearing his dead gran’s pink housecoat and a silly hat, with a pocket full of 10p pieces, trying to sort out their next meal, the next chapter of their lives. This is friendship. This is love.
