Customer Reviews

The Thirteenth Room

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The book's cover boasts that Parkinson gives readers `an original and beautifully written novel.' `Tis that, and more. Loaded with all the melancholy that readers expect to find in good Irish fiction, The Thirteenth Room has us wishing throughout that our heroine, Niamh Lawlor, can find the common sense to make good decisions in her life. For the thirteenth room is where Niamh and the rest of us find ourselves, the room that we're warned not to enter, yet at great risk always do. To wit, instructed to leave presents under the Christmas tree unopened until Christmas morning, the youngster child sneaks downstairs in the dead of night and opens one or two tagged with his or her name. Worse, if feasible, the deed is then denied. `I didn't do it, Da. Must've been the dog.'

The author acknowledges the Grimm Brothers' adult tale `Mary's Child' in which a woodcutter's young daughter is offered a gratis pass to heaven by the Virgin Mary. The only stipulation is that the young lady, while free to open and enter heaven's many and wondrous doors, must leave the door of the thirteenth room shut tight. Not only does she fail to stay out of old number thirteen, the woodcutter's daughter denies to the Virgin Mary repeatedly that she violated the pact. Offered numerous chances to come clean, at great cost to herself she continues to deny the misdeed.

We happen on nurse Niamh as she applies for and secures the position of caregiver to a fairly well-heeled farmer in the Irish countryside near the town of Dromadden. Taggert is his name and throughout we're only provided a first initial of `Z' to further identify him. Taggert's bedridden and sliding down a slippery slope to eternal life and just ornery enough to hang on if only to incense his wifely nemesis, Elise, who hires Niamh to keep Taggert quiet while Elise socializes with a dysfunctional cast of entertaining but inept band of gadflies.

There is Redmond, who's not quite handsome with his unruly, grey-tipped hair, and a bit of a wise-guy to boot. He's also much older than our twenty-something Niamh, who's naturally drawn to the rogue in him. Further, there is Elise, whose every perceived, haughty verbal slight to Niamh is dissected at great length in the book's pages. There is Bernard the Bank, who just may be gay and routinely responds to everything in Latin, evidently unaware that Latin is a dead language. We meet an elderly American man squiring a younger woman who might or might not be French, as he arrives at a gathering which Elise calls to introduce Niamh to the gadflies.



Elise's son Johnny is a gleeful, developmentally disabled child of nine who adds cheer to an otherwise contrived atmosphere around the Taggert farm. The Scullys, Ambrose and Lily, maintain the farm and help out with cooking and cleaning, whenever they're able to suspend gossiping about Elise behind her back. Father Noel the priest and Miss Reilly the librarian round out the active character roster and find themselves existing in Niamh's slight disfavor.

Niamh, who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a flat and escape her mother's verbal degradations, is soon enough bound up in the worst subplot of all, that being the Dromadden scandal. Not only does Niamh learn a horrific tale involving a local fifteen-year old girl giving birth to a baby in, of all places, an outhouse, but hears that the girl died during childbirth and was a shirttail relative of Elise's. Worse, the young lady, Miriam, lived part-time at the Taggert farm in the room that Niamh now occupies, and her ghost may yet walk the halls at night.

The question begs: who was the father of Miriam's supposed-stillborn baby? Was it the young boyfriend who disappeared, yet was not pursued by the authorities? Gasp, could the father be the old grouch Taggert? Redmond? Father Noel? Ambrose Scully? With her mind running wild with possibilities, Niamh wonders if young Johnny might even be Miriam's baby. After all, the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck during birth and, of course, Johnny is developmentally delayed.

Join up with Niamh as she searches for answers and ultimately finds herself opening the door of the dreaded thirteenth room.

Author Parkinson lives in Dublin and is a noted writer of books targeted to children and teenagers. She's won numerous awards and has seen her books published in many languages and in many parts of the world.