Customer Reviews

An Irish Country Childhood: Memories of a Bygone Age

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a marvelous little book recounting a childhood in Ireland. It is eminently readable and will transport you to a simpler world for a few hours.

"Irish storyteller Marrie Walsh pens a memoir rich with the gifts of warmth, magic and wonder, revisting the scenes of her youth, where every neighbor was family, where hermits and bogey men and ghosts were all equally real and frightening, and where time seemed to have stopped for a while." (synopsis by Alibris)
I love personal accounts of growing up in an earlier generation. This is not the gritty, struggle that was Frank McCourt's experience of a city, depression era childhood. Instead the reader gets the country view of that same period.

Reading this book recently allowed me to discover a worthy successor to Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford". Which to my mind stands as the classic textured literary time machine, that allows the reader to taste, touch, hear & smell a bygone era in full measure. Marrie Walsh has created a minor masterpiece with her (first?) book. Not only will those devotees of the country life memoirs find similarities with Thompson, but also touches of Miss Read as well as WB Yeats and Thomas Hardy here. The bitter as well as the sweet with a magical touch of folklife for good measure. Highly recommended. And may we see many more works from Ms Walsh's pen.

Marrie Walsh was born in 1929, the ninth of twelve children, in an Irish farming village. With a great memory and a great way with words--Marrie knows both English and Gaelic--she has written a charming and lyrical sometimes funny, sometimes sad account of a life now gone. She includes many details of folklore and farming life, and her shorrt work is the same high quality as Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford" and Miss Read's fictional accounts of Thrush Green and Fairacre. Even in a small village, human life is portrayed in its complexity--the good, the mean, the generous, the bad, the honest, the scheming, etc. I highly recommend this book--it's a real treat and one I will reread.