7/31/2023 0 Comments The hearts invisible furies![]() Banished, she makes her way to Dublin where she befriends Sean MacIntyre, who takes pity on the young, visibly pregnant woman and invites her to live with him and his roommate, Jack Smoot. She is publicly shamed by the town priest for being pregnant so young, which provides the context for how conservative Ireland was in those days. The book begins when Cyril’s birth mother, Catherine Goggin, is cast out of her hometown of Goleen, Ireland, as a teenage mother in 1945. Inspired by Ireland’s Equal Rights Marriage Referendum, Boyne utilizes the story of Cyril Avery to represent how his country managed to change dramatically over a short span of time. Though The Heart’s Invisible Furies is new to the U.S., it was published in the U.K. I wanted to read Boyne, who has written 10 novels for adults and five for young readers (his international bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is his best-known work), due to a combination of my interest in this very long book as my chosen summer read, the perspective of an Irish writer on the old Catholic mores of Dublin and the country at large, and because I was intrigued by this stranger’s passion. I was raised Catholic and my frame of reference for all things Ireland is the Catholic Church. I’m a trained librarian, a proud bookworm who prefers Goodreads to all other social media, and a writer. “It’s the best book you’ll read all year.” “You really need to pick that one up,” she said, as if my internal voice had gone external. ![]() I wasn’t sure I could stand to bring one more book home. It was a doozy of a galley, thick and intimidating. At this year’s BookExpo, surrounded by stacks of galleys (most of which I tried to haul from the Jacob Javitz Center in Manhattan on two different train rides to the South Bronx in an effort to claim the world’s nerdiest #FirstWorldProblems award) I was introduced to the Irish novelist John Boyne by a woman who saw me staring at the pink and red tome with a puzzled look on my face. ![]()
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