"Getting Catholicism -troubles and 90's Right in Derry Girls" by Jake Martin, America

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/02/07/getting-catholicism-troubles-and-90s-nostalgia-right-derry-girls?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletters&utm_content=3+-+Getting+Catholicism+the+Troubles+and+90s&utm_campaign=Newsletter&source=Newsletter

"Tanks of soldiers carrying heavy artillery circle the wall surrounding the city of Derry in Northern Ireland. While the local news reports that another bomb was found attached to a bridge and has brought the city to a standstill, 16-year-old Erin Quinn is inconsolable because her cousin Orla has been reading her diary.

Such is the life of a teenager. Such is life in wartime. It’s just another day for Derry girls...Their focus on boys, exams and music really has nothing to do with the heedlessness of youth: We see Erin’s Aunt Sarah (Kathy Kiera Clarke) up in arms about the bomb on the bridge because it interferes with her time at the tanning bed, while Erin’s mother (Tara Lynne O’Neill) is simultaneously upset because she cannot spend another moment in the house with her teenage daughter. This is all terrific fodder for comedy, but it is more than that. The very reason it is funny is the same reason it penetrates: It is true. Erin, her friends and family get on with living their lives, the big and the small, the loving and hating, the major and the minor. They do what they can do because that is all they can do.

However tragic or unwieldy the bigger picture is, we live in the smaller picture. Our world is an immediate one, with its ungrateful, self-obsessed teenagers, cranky fathers-in-law, wacky aunts, sullen clerks and family dinners. This is life in wartime; this is life in our times. You get on with it."

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