demidesign

To say this book starts off slowly is a major understatement. It lulls you. For 50%+ of the page count the narrative is quite uneventful, a stomach churning journey at sea being as dramatic as it gets. This journey takes the protagonist, a young Irish woman, from the small town she has grown up in and is all she knows to Brooklyn, NY. Once she arrives in a strange land you expect the narrative to pick up steam, but it does not. Instead it quietly moves forward via a writing style that is not at all showy, but simple and straight forward and lovely and easy to be carried along by. Just as we're beginning to seriously wonder if anything dramatic is going to happen, something does, something that returns Eilis to Ireland for a month. I won't say what the event is, not that specificity matters all that much here. What matters is that once Eilis is back in her hometown she comes to realize that life contains a handful of vital choices - some that are made for you and some you make for yourself; some that are well thought out over a long period of time and others that are made in an impetuous flash; some which can be easily undone, some that are tortuous to undo, and some that are irrevocable. Each of us is in charge of our own destiny. Each of us is equally subject to the whims of fate, helpless to do anything about it. Eventually we will look back and see this is where that ended, this is where that began, and we will reflect on the fact that our lives easily could have gone far differently if only. But that is a life unlived. Dwelling on what did not come to be will get us nothing except for a solitary trip down memory lane. This lesson is masterfully laid out before readers patient enough to see the story through to the end.

2023-01-05 02:01