Customer Reviews

In Sunshine or in Shadow: Stories by Irish Women

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All of the stories in this book were easy to latch on to, some were more enjoyable than others and I wished they didn't end so fast. The Orphan, by Mary Dorcey, is without a doubt the most disturbing thing that I have ever read, and I wept while reading it. Is it possible that such evil could exist? Is it possible that this story is based on fact? This book made me definitely want to read more by these authors, most of whome were unfamiliar to me (with the exception of Maeve Binchy and Mary Gordon). However, I don't think their books are too available in the US. As I am planning a trip to Ireland this summer, I will surely look for them. I would definitely recommend this book.

If love, as the cover claims, is the common thread in these nineteen stories, then love must be a strange fiction in the Irish sensibility. Most of the stories reek of disappointed, disaffected females: no harm in that either, now that I think of it. But hang on a minute. Why are some of the stories so badly written? Is there a suggestion that many of these pieces, because they were commissioned (as the introduction suggests), have suffered from being 'forced' out onto the page? That's how it strikes me. It was difficult to see any logical connection between the stories and the introduction of divorce in Ireland. A couple of the works really succeed, among them Ita Daly's genuinely-sustained, atmospheric 'Do the Decent Thing'. In this story, Rosa observes her stifling, oppressive family, and attempts to forge a sense of reconcilation within herself in relation to the father who has disappointed her. The thing about this story is that this family is a universally oppressed one, not peculiar to the Irish, nor proclaiming its Irishness as if this was a special 'condition' or 'disease'. Mary Morrissey's 'Clods' hits the mark with its splendid laying bare of death, a rural funeral, and the narrator's turmoil. Moreover, her dialogue and character-interaction is superb. And Mary O'Donnell's multi-layered story 'Passover' certainly taps into the global voice: Rosanna, freshly delivered from childbirth in Dublin, reflects on the experience both before and after. But this is no softly-contoured look at maternity. It is a work which drives hard in its use of language to lay bare the essential epiphany which has been the narrator's experience. The story is about pain and violence, not just in childbirth, but in war too, which the author deftly links to wars everywhere, including Vietnam. Connections are made constantly - some of them amusing - between America and Ireland, between pain and beauty, between birth and death. Otherwise, some of the stories are lighter and perhaps more predictable. The title could be re-thought if this book were to be reprinted. As it stands, it's corny, sort of softly-softly womany-sounding!