I loved this book about the complicated love between mothers and daughters and the way families repeat mistakes. This is a skillfull use of Celtic mythology ot explain the longings we don't understand in other people. It's good to read a book that understands people don't always get what they need or even what they want. ( )

Three generations of Irish-American women cope with life. Set around the death of one of them.

mother-daughter, Ireland, fiction ( )

This is a story about three generations of Irish women, in the end coming full circle back to the island of their origin. Watching them repeat the mistakes of their forebears because of lack of communication is sad. Although each story is a little different, the connections between them are obvious even as they are intertwined. Cliona gives birth to her daughter, Grace, in America, knowing that she will be rejected if she returns to her Irish island. Grace rebels almost instantly against her mother, and it is her story that is the saddest as she never quite gets what she wants and loses everything in the end. Grace’s daughter, Grainne, is extremely close to her mother but has believed her grandmother dead since she was three. Instead, she finds herself returning to the island, facing a new life that she must adapt to.

I enjoyed this book. I thought there was little too much emphasis on sex, as there does tend to be, and the author frequently talked about how people smelled. I don’t know about anyone else, but I know very few people who have such a distinctive smell present around them all the time. In fact, I can only think of one. It threw me out of the story instead of bringing me in, which I don’t think was the author’s intention, just because she talked about people’s scents very frequently. Setting that aside, I found the book moving, especially the communication barriers that life constantly throws up around us. That is so true, especially between teenagers and their parents. Families can be brutal and I think that Lisa Carey shows how true that is, despite the love that is ever-present. I’m not sure I would recommend this book to someone else unless they suggested it first, but I did enjoy it.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=59 ( )

A rich story of mothers and daughters and the mistakes we make that manages to almost entirely avoid the maudlin, melodramatic, yet forgettable nature that seems to plague most "strong women" fiction. The similarities between grandmother, mother, and daughter's personalities, locations, and situations made an otherwise straightforward story into a deeper and more layered experience. However, those similarities combined with the narrative shifts and non-chronological telling meant that you had to pay attention or risk losing track of whose story you were in. I thought the use of Irish mythology added another nice layer of texture to the story without being too affected. The one element that disappointed me, however, was Grace's relationship with Seamus; it was never clear to me what he saw in her, yet it was clearly a major turning point in these women's lives. Overall, an enjoyable read, and moving in its own way. ( )

The story of three generations of women and how their lives mirror each other, yet stay different. What they are all looking for is love and a home but the searching doesn't always find what they're looking for.
This is one of the few books I've read by someone from the US that doesn't make me want to get annoyed because they dwell on comparing Ireland to the US. This just describes how things are and lets the reader decide.
I really did enjoy the story, I'm glad that my curiousity about some LT Authors made me hunt it up and read it. I would recommend it as a read.
The echoes of Graineuaile and mermaids in the story were well done as well. ( )