Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession is a fun, dry, wholesome, and satisfying story about some normal people just sort of going through life together.

Early in the story we meet Leonard and Hungry Paul, two simple and straightforward men who schedule regular gaming nights to play things like Yahtzee, Monopoly, Connect Four, or checkers.

The storyline is about transition. Hungry Paul’s sister is getting married, which symbolizes her separation from her parents (whom Paul lives with), from Paul himself, and signals a new phase of all of their lives. There is also Leonard, who experiences both loss and new beginnings and tries to figure out what his life looks like.

Along with the story, it’s the characters that keep you listening.

I’ll start with Leonard. He writes children’s encyclopedias for a living, and both he and the children lucky enough to have found his sort of obscure books love how he explains and explores so many topics in a way that illustrates things, teaches about them, and lets you relate to the world, especially the natural world. In this way I already found myself in love with Leonard.

Then there is Hungry Paul, who works as a postal worker, sometimes, when someone is ill or on holiday. Unlike Leonard, Hungry Paul is very matter of fact, less passionate, less curious, which the author makes clear when he describes Hungry Paul’s experience of an ambulance siren or a dog barking. Where most of us wonder where the ambulance is going and what may have happened to someone who may be injured or in trouble, to Paul, he just hears the ambulance siren. That’s it. He is not a mean person, as someone so matter of fact could be. What he has going for him is that he really, truly understands right from wrong and is a gracious man in terms of how to treat others.

The combination of these two people and all of their different traits makes them something of a dual role model, where you want to pick pieces and parts of each of their personalities in order to live your own life.

The two of them, together, are gratifyingly consistent and stable and dependable, as is the story itself. You trust them, what they say, and what they will do, and you trust the author to keep you entertained and interested in this short little read, which I highly recommend :)