Book Review: The Drowned Village by Kathlen McGurl

Some books have the power to remain with the reader forever; The Drowned Village is such a book. If there is one lesson to be learned from this story, it is that none of us can expect to have complete control over our lives. There is always the possibility that we will be dealt an unexpected blow, even an undeserving one, and even the most unfortunate among us must continue to put one foot in front of the other and make the best from what we have left.

Read the full review below or watch the video here or at https://youtu.be/fp03wQGuvX8.

Stella is ten years old in 1935 as she walks the Old Corpse Road with her father, her younger sister and a funeral procession for her mother. The family is poor, the father cobbling together the barest of income by making repairs to neighbors’ equipment, such as bicycles. With his wife gone, he must support his family while also babysitting three-year-old Jessie while Stella is at school. When his elderly father requires assistance with his most basic of needs, he must move him into his own home and care for him as well. Added to this weight is the news that Brackendale Green, the English village in which they live, will be completely demolished as a newly built dam is expected to flood the village.

Through the course of this book, we see a motherless child forced to grow up all too swiftly as catastrophic events beyond her control cause her to lose everything she’s ever known. She blames herself through the decades for being unable to stop these events, despite the fact that she was only a child when they occurred.

As we flash forward to the present day, Stella is an elderly woman urging her grown granddaughter Laura to visit the Lake District after an unusual drought has left the lakebed dry, exposing the village for the first time in decades. There are secrets hidden in the ruins, secrets that have haunted Stella for an entire lifetime and now, too frail to go herself, it is up to Laura to uncover them and set things right. Laura is rebounding from a disastrous relationship and needs a break from her job and caring for her grandmother. What she will find in the drowned village will change not only her grandmother’s life but also her own.

The Lake District with its condemned village, inspired by the real Haweswater reservoir and Mardale Valley, comes alive. I could feel the heaviness as Stella walked along the Old Corpse Road, could picture the variety of characters in the village—both friend and foe—and I felt as though I had been transported back in time. The characters are so multi-dimensional that I realized I was intentionally slowing down my reading because I did not want the book to end. And when it did, I found myself dreaming about Stella, her father and her sister. 

The Drowned Village by Kathleen McGurl is a classic. I highly recommend it.

Read more book reviews at http://pmterrell.com/authors-and-books/. p.m.terrell is the award-winning, internationally acclaimed author of more than 22 books in a variety of genres.

The Forgotten Secret by Kathleen McGurl

In The Forgotten Secret by Kathleen McGurl, Clare Farrell is approaching her 50^th birthday. For half of her life she has been married to a narcissistic man who has systematically cut her off from everything and everyone that did not center around him. So when Clare inherits her uncle’s home in Ireland along with a monetary inheritance, she decides to take the leap and separate from her husband and begin life anew. The house holds secrets, including a stash of guns and weapons under a floor in the barn and a birth certificate and communion medallion from two separate people tucked away in the stuffing of an old armchair.

Watch the video below or skip beneath it for the rest of the book review.

I rooted for Clare. I cheered for her, cried with her and laughed with her. Breaking away would not be easy and she encounters events such as wrecking her automobile on an Irish country road to renovating a centuries-old home that has fallen into disrepair. But she makes friends in the nearby village and she exhibits a lot of grit, determination and courage.

In between Clare’s chapters, we learn of a woman connected to the house a century earlier during the Irish War for Independence. Ellen O’Brien lives with her crotchety father in a modest home but she’s dating Jimmy Gallagher, a young man she’s known an entire lifetime. They were best friends in school and now they’ve become lovers as well as clandestine members of the Irish underground volunteers fighting for independence from Great Britain. It is Jimmy who grew up in the house that Clare inherits and it’s both Jimmy’s story and Ellen’s that rolls out through the book.

The author, Kathleen McGurl, describes the countryside so well that I could see the village in my mind’s eye, both as it was in 1920 as well as present day. I came to respect the danger that Ellen, Jimmy and others willingly undertook to fight for their cause—a cause that would cost some their lives. And when Ellen discovers she is pregnant yet she is still unmarried, I felt her anguish at being sent to one of the Magdalene Laundries, a convent for unwed mothers and their babies that turned into an unsaintly prison.

We also see the contrasts in what women could accomplish within a brief hundred years—at Ellen’s dependency on her father and the kindness of strangers to Clare’s struggle for independence.

Like all of McGurl’s books, there are multiple threads that seem unrelated but all blend together into a seamless mosaic of love and war, endings and new beginnings. I highly recommend The Forgotten Secret by Kathleen McGurl.

The Heroine in Ireland: The Girl from Ballymor

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.

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.

Watch my video review of The Girl from Ballymor here, or on YouTube at https://youtu.be/KUGCxgE_xIM