This is a review I wrote for the Carnegie Medal Award site. I believe the story is inspired by real events in Ireland in the 1980's. I will revise when I get a chance:

There is a very poetic and lilting feel to the writing in this beatifully written but very sad book. The setting is a small community in Ireland where everyone knows your business, has opinions on it, and although religion plays a strong part in the life of the town, a christian approach to helping each other is not always evident.

The focus is on a young teenage girl Shell, who certainly does not have her troubles to seek. Her mother is dead leaving her to cope with her younger brother and sister as well as a father who is certainly not playing his role of parent. She finds comfort in the arms of a teenage boy but the relationship leads to her being caught up in a horrible scandal.

There is a lot that is very sad about this book, but ultimately I thought that there was hope at the end, though maybe not what you could call a very happy ending.

A lovely book which held my attention from first page to last.

In the West, we neurotically divide academic studies into either "science" or "arts"..... a dichotomy that would be beyond the comprehension of traditional Chinese thinkers.

Sanjida O'Connell is a Ph. D. in zoology, but this book demonstrates that she is also an artist; that for her this separation of disciplines is meaningless.

Strangely, this woman author has made the central protagonist and narrator male. Unsurprisingly, he is a zoologist.

Niall Edwards has decided to travel to a fishing village on the North-Eastern coast of Ulster to study magpies, rents a little cottage, and settles down to become a local and do his field work. The book contains a wealth of information, not just about magpies, but also about life-forms of every conceivable sort, including lyrical descriptions of all kinds of herbs, wild flowers, and sea creatures, all brought to life with extraordinary vividness. We learn of the polyandery of the female dunnock, the curious symbiosis between the bee-orchid and the bumble bee and the promiscuity of various species, (both male and female) including that most dangerous of animals, homo sapiens.

Niall is apparently a good-looking lad. Tired of eating baked beans with Mother's Pride bread, he heads out of town to a nearby restaurant which serves only vegetarian food. The head chef, Eddie, seems slightly menacing, wearing a tee-shirt, jeans and a wide belt dangling an array of sharp knives like weaponry for medieaval warfare. Eddie is also a girl. Like Niall, she is tall and skinny, black-haired and blue-eyed. At first sight Niall wants to eat her. Fortunately, field work has taught him that patience is often rewarded.

Niall is up at dawn each morning, armed with sandwiches, binoculars, a dictaphone. Hunting for magpies, observing them, recording observations, habitats, food sources and behaviours.

Not content, even after Eddie the chef moves in to become his live-in lover, and resident chef.... Niall has to obey his hormones like a tom-cat. He becomes fascinated by a mysterious horsewoman who passes him on the beach, mounted on the most beautiful and powerful horse imaginable. Niall enjoys the occasional romp with this dark and exotic creature, (the woman, not the horse) one Nadia Ismael

Although the behaviour of the central character is rather typically that of a young FHM reader (FHM is a gentleman's journal aimed at males with an attention-span not exceeding 3 minutes), the descriptions both of sex, food and plants are delicate, feminine and sensual.

So, Niall apparently has it made, except that slowly he begins to lose his grip on reality. He has recurring hallucinations, and the nightmares that cause him to wake in a panic are re-enacted in his mind's eye even when he is awake.

Several other characters are introduced, one a big man who sculpts timber with a chain-saw, another who is a swordsmith, and the old gentlemen who sit in the pub and watch all that happens in the village. Various friends advise him that he needs to take care of Eddie, to value what he has. Well, no one really understands the value of anything until he loses it.

There is an awful lot of discussion about angels.... Eddie has made them her life-study. The bedroom is festooned with images of them. Her knowledge of them is encyclopaedic. There is some discussion about the fact that angels are said to no longer have the option of free will. In that respect they resemble that most industrious of creatures, the ant. She is a little like an archangel herself... a bringer of comfort and warmth, but toting those knives she could be quite different.....

Essentially, the book documents young man under-going a mental break-down, a love-story, and a treatise on all kinds of natural history.

Buy it and read it to the end. I found the ending very satisfying, all neat and wrapped up by an angel.

Daughter of the Forest is a re-telling of a Celtic myth in which 6 brothers are turned into swans by their evil step-mother. Their little sister must obey a vow of silence and weave 6 shirts out of prickly nettles and clothe them to return them to their original forms. The author, Marillier, sticks pretty close to this plot, and sets the story in ancient Ireland.

Although the story is about the brothers' curse, the book takes a while to get to it. Before the evil step-mother arrives, Sorcha (the little sister) nurses an unstable man tortured by her own people back to health. The uneasy relationship between Sorcha and the man, Simon, was compelling, and I wanted very much to see how it played out, but once the glacial pace finally picked up and the main plot began, Simon disappears. He reappears only at the end of the book, and ends up being a completely irrelevant character. I'm guessing the only reason he's in the book at all is to set up something in the sequels.

About halfway through the book, there is a brutal, sexually explicit scene. At this point, I stopped reading and skimmed the rest of the book because the scene put me off. I don't mind violence, usually, but this scene seemed gratuitous, inserted only to shock the reader and heap additional woe on a character who has already reached the angst limit.

It seems that I was right to stop, as from what I could tell the book turns into a run-of-the-mill romance, complete with a perfect man who is manly and sensitive and eager to rescue fair maidens from villainy. I myself don't like this kind of thing, and didn't like to see the book change from an adventure story into a Harlequin romance.

On the bright side, the characters of the brothers are interesting, each one distinct and well-drawn. The warm relationship between Sorcha and her brothers was great, and is a rare example, in my experience, of sibling camaraderie and friendship in fiction. Sorcha herself is a strong character, but perhaps comes off as being too strong, almost angelic -- she never seems to waver in her determination to save her brothers, not even after what she endures.

Although I didn't end up liking it, it is a pretty good book -- at least for the first half -- and most other reviews I've seen of it have been overwhelmingly positive. The quality of the writing itself wasn't bad, it was just that the author wrote about things I didn't want to read about. I may pick up the sequels, in the hopes of seeing more of the brother characters.

Part of the multi-author Myth Series from Canongate, Dream Angus is a beautifully written novel composed of delightfully written vignettes, both mythological and modern. Alexander McCall Smith, most famous for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, employs the same bewitching narrative but with a new classic epic twist.

Angus is the Celtic god of dreams, youth and love. His father, Dagda, much like his Greek counterpart Zeus, tricked the water spirit Boann into conceiving his son and froze her husband in time until the child was conceived and eventually stolen away by Dagda. Not that Dagda wanted to raise him or had any paternal interest in him, it simply suited him to be rotten. Angus, who is fleet of foot and graceful in all things, runs with deer, and is beloved of birds who circle his head and warn him of danger. Angus is beloved by all and inspires enlightening dreams in all around him. It is easy to become enamored of Angus while envisioning him, he has the beauty of Apollo, the devishness of Mercury and the aura of Eros.

Each mythical retelling of Angus is followed by a chapter carrying the preceding mythological theme, but with a modern twist. Each chapter (except those of Angus) occur in a different time and place, but the characters are familiar in their foibles and dreams. Uniquely funny, tragic and rich in mythological theme, Dream Angus was a quick, delightful and whimsical read.

I don't actually know anything about the myth of Angus, had never heard of The Dagda, so I had nothing to draw on in terms of comparing this telling to the myth itself. Therefore I can't say how it compares, or even if I was missing anything by having no prior knowledge.

One of the titles in Canongate's The Myths series, Dream Angus centers around Angus, a God of Love and Dreams. Born to Boann, after she was tricked by Dagda, Angus is quickly stolen from his mother and handed off to one of his kin. All who encounter him are the better for it.

Upon eventually learning of his true parentage, Angus, with the help of the man who raised him, takes Dagda's kingdom from him, much to the liking of his subjects.

Interweaved among his own tales are other stories. An unknown newly-wed couple. A pair of brothers who are to be separated. A pig-keeper. Sometimes the connection was easy to see, other times not, but somehow it all fit.

This is a book very different from my usual fair, which I find makes it hard for me to write about well. The writing was good, and the tales were definitely interesting. Inspired me to at least take a peak at the other Myths books to see if I might like to read them as well.

If you're into myths yourself, obviously this ought to be up your alley. If you're looking to stray from your normal fare, I'd also say it's worth a look. It should get your brain working, if nothing else.

Priest is a nominee for a 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel.This is Bruen's fifth novel with ex-Garda Siochana (police force) Jack Taylor. If possible, you should read the series in order.I skipped the previous book, The Dramatist, and, while not lost, there were details that would have helped to understand characters and events.

The book set in Galway and opens with Jack coming back to awareness in a mental hospital where he had been committed after a personal tragedy left him unable to cope with reality.After being released, becomes involved, unofficially, in the investigation of the murder and decapitation of a Catholic Priest, Father Joyce. Jack has a peculular and verbally hostile supporter in Ridge, a lesbian detective in the Garda who earlier put Jack in the hospital. There are forces in Galway who do not want Jack to pursue his investigation.

Along the way, Jack gains an unlikely partner, a young man who's idea of the work and lifestyle of private investigators appears to be based on too many TV shows and movies. He provides the lighter, comic elements to a side story line.The story lines are interesting but the real focus is Jack's attempt to deal with his alcoholism and inner torments. It makes for dark, gritty, painful reading and comes across as a realistic portrait of a recovering alcoholic.

The Catholic church doesn't fare too well in Priest. None of the clergy are remotely sympathetic as Jack's investigation turns up evidence that Father Joyce had an unnatural fondness for little boys.

Ken Bruen writes clean, spare prose without anything that could be considered filler. He is the master of the one word paragraph. Where other authors use punctuation to describe a lost of words, concepts, etc., Bruen creates his lists as if he was writing them down on a notepad. For example, here is the opening sentence of Priest:

What I remember most about the mental hospital     The madhouse     The loony bin     The home for the bewilderedis that a black man may have saved my life.and these sentences:I picked it up. Pascal, Pensees.     Stole that.     Didn't think I'd ever open it.     I was wrong.

If a word isn't absolutely necessary, Bruen doesn't use it.

Priest is a dark look at contemporary Ireland, the Church, and society. It is a compelling read.

I was given this book by our Teen Librarian, who knows I like fantasy. I took a pause from my library books to give this one a go. It's definitely one of the more original stories I've read of late. It feels odd to say that. But then, if I were Irish, maybe I wouldn't be saying it. Funnily enough, Aengus and the Dagda made an appearance...I found that an interesting coincidence, so close to my taking a leap out of my norm and reading Dream Angus.

So. J.J. Liddy comes from a musical family with a somewhat tarnished past, which involves his grandfather, a flute, and a priest. The flute and priest disappeared, and the family was never able to live it down. But upon learning the full story from his mother, J.J. finds a renewed pride in who he is and his music.

Which leaves only the problem of time. Which there is never enough of.

Busses are always late. Chores barely get finished, homework is never done. J.J. takes it upon himself to find a way to buy his mother time for her birthday, which she can't believe is already approaching again. While off delivering cheese to a neighbor, he is taken to a souterrain and shown a secret. An entrance into a mythical land. A land which once had no time, but now does.

Time there moves much slower than in his world, though, so J.J. has a hard time truly worrying about it, even though there's something nagging constantly at the back of his mind. He picks up a stray dog, meets so natives, learns some new tunes.

Back home, his parents are frantic. Eventually he's gone so long, the woman who sent him on his way comes to retrieve him, only to be misdirected. J.J. is busy helping Aengus Og to seek out the time leak. The "fairies" want their ways back. The "ploddies" want their time.

After running out of ideas, Aengus takes J.J. to see his father, the Dagda, who admits to knowing the leak is close by. This in turn, through a set of somewhat surprising circumstances, leads J.J. to the answer to the riddle. More than one riddle, even.

As someone who knows how it can be to blink away spans of time as large as 6 months, I found the whole time leak idea really fascinating. As a musician, I really liked the heavy musical influences as well. These people were all about it. And dancing.

Between each chapter is a little tune, which some might skip over, but which I read as part of the story. Had I read more of it at home, I might have taken out my own flute or clarinet to give them a go. It was definitely something that set it a bit apart.

I'd recommend it to any fantasy fiend, or music lover. And to anyone who wants something a little bit different.