Mary McGarry

Picked this one up from a yard sale not far from our house in San Bernardino at the base of the hills where everything starts angling up and driveways are very steep. The old lady and her husband were very, very drunk. She spoke at me only when I tried to open my mouth, so my wife did all the talking. They let us have ‘em for free, so yay. This book was okay. It's a short hodgepodge of Irish folktales as interpreted by various authors. The tales themselves are fine, I am familiar with most of them and the retellings here range from okay fairytales to very dry accounts. However, by far the worst story in this book is The King and the Bishop.
The entire story is a narrative told by a peasant and the text is virtually all dialogue written in his accent/dialect which makes it impossible to read. I tried several times to get through it, its only about five pages in length, but I just could not do it even scanning it. The terrible method kept me apart from the story. Otherwise, most of the tales are fine.
My favorite was the first, The Fate of the Children of Lir. The Brewery of Eggshells, Diarmid and Grainne, and Oisin in Tir Na Nog were the best besides my favorite. Honorable mentions to The Story of Deirdre, The Giant's Stairs, and The Crookened Back.
The art, on the other hand, I enjoyed quite a bit. If anything it's a quick read, a short book, and the art is worth a couple of bucks to ogle at occasionally. It was okay.… (more)

This is an extremely varied collection, with everything from fifteen-page stories of the Fianna to half-page vignettes that are more elaborate jokes than anything. It's fairly evenly split between folktales and mythology, and includes a few stories I don't have in any of my other Irish collections (including two stories about Clanmacnoise, one about Brigit, and a fairly fabulous Pooka tale). Also, although it includes the Oisin story, it's not the last story in the collection for once, which I deeply appreciate.… (more)