There are many
good books but only occasional great ones, and The
Girl from Ballymor definitely is one of the great ones. It has reminded
me many times over how it was books like this one that caused me to fall in
love with reading, which later led to a lifelong love of writing as well.
Because of that, I have decided to create a new playlist on YouTube containing
book reviews as well as post reviews on my blogs. I am a notoriously slow
reader; I prefer to read a scene and allow it to marinate, rolling it around in
my mind until I can truly feel like I am there as one of the characters,
allowing their circumstances to settle into my consciousness. For that reason,
I will not be publishing many reviews each year, but those I do are definitely
ones I recommend.
The
Girl from Ballymor
is told in two time periods as our contemporary Maria travels to Ireland to
research her family history and specifically Kitty McCarthy, a grandmother
several generations back. The plot grabbed my attention from the start
because those that follow my blogs and writing know that I began a quest many
years ago to find my ancestors in Ireland. Though my father and grandfather had
amassed quite a bit of information, it was concentrated on ancestors in America
and I wanted to go further back, partly to find out why I was so drawn to the
Emerald Isle.
We discover Maria’s ancestor Kitty after she married and had six children, though her earlier years are told in vivid flashbacks. To say she did not have an easy life is a vast understatement. Her husband Patrick has died in a copper mine accident and several of her children have perished during the potato famine of the 1840s, which drastically reduced the population from eight million to lower than three million, between starvation-related deaths and survivors fleeing the island. The three survivors—Kitty, her eldest son Michael and her daughter Gracie—are slowly starving.
We discover Maria’s ancestor Kitty after she married and had six children, though her earlier years are told in vivid flashbacks. To say she did not have an easy life is a vast understatement. Her husband Patrick has died in a copper mine accident and several of her children have perished during the potato famine of the 1840s, which drastically reduced the population from eight million to lower than three million, between starvation-related deaths and survivors fleeing the island. The three survivors—Kitty, her eldest son Michael and her daughter Gracie—are slowly starving.
Maria is there
to discover what happened because Michael survived, immigrating first to
America and then returning on his own quest to find his mother. He had become a
famous artist, and many of his portraits featured the same young woman, his
mother, often wearing a Celtic brooch; yet there are no records of her death.
This is a book with so many layers that it's worth reading again and again, a classic for the ages. There's the realization that both then and now, a person’s existence is often determined by where they live, the social class they were born into, and how they handle problems and challenges, some of which are life threatening, that ultimately will decide their fate. In a time that has become increasingly more complex, the reader steps into a completely different world as we travel back to the 1840’s when the only goal was to find work to survive just one more day, even if that work is breaking rocks by hand in the Irish rain, hour after hour, for a cup of warm broth or a bite of cheese or bread.
Kathleen McGurl is a fabulous writer, her style reminiscent of authors I fell in love with so many decades ago, authors that expanded my horizons, broadened my understanding of the world, and have always caused me to want to be a better person. McGurl deserves to be listed among the greatest of them, her words carrying weight, the characters alive in my soul, long after reading that last page.
This is a book with so many layers that it's worth reading again and again, a classic for the ages. There's the realization that both then and now, a person’s existence is often determined by where they live, the social class they were born into, and how they handle problems and challenges, some of which are life threatening, that ultimately will decide their fate. In a time that has become increasingly more complex, the reader steps into a completely different world as we travel back to the 1840’s when the only goal was to find work to survive just one more day, even if that work is breaking rocks by hand in the Irish rain, hour after hour, for a cup of warm broth or a bite of cheese or bread.
Kathleen McGurl is a fabulous writer, her style reminiscent of authors I fell in love with so many decades ago, authors that expanded my horizons, broadened my understanding of the world, and have always caused me to want to be a better person. McGurl deserves to be listed among the greatest of them, her words carrying weight, the characters alive in my soul, long after reading that last page.
Watch my video
review of The
Girl from Ballymor here, or on YouTube at https://youtu.be/KUGCxgE_xIM
