It was the NYT review that took me to this book; that review referred to the “traumatic family secret” of the young woman Saoirse, an American who made her way to Ireland in 1990. So, SPOILER ALERT, here’s that secret: it’s a book about the trafficking of children to move drugs in the US and this young woman’s escape to Ireland. I’m afraid that makes the book sound completely unbearable, but somehow the author shows us people with great kindness, warmth, personal appeal, and artistic talent, as well as others who are traffickers and abusers.
We know from the outset that Saoirse is hiding something important, that she is in desperate straits, and is practiced at making her way in unknown circumstances. In this case she is impersonating an Irish woman whose passport she has stolen and is navigating a foreign bureaucracy. She falls in with an unpleasant man with a complicated family and after one night in his bed, becomes pregnant. The family engulfs her in kind and unkind ways, and her artistic talents begin to emerge. She and a family friend Daithi find they have a strong connection. She becomes Saoirse, that iconic Irish name that means “freedom.” Her artistic talent is in evidence from the outset.
For years her secret remains hidden but when Sarah, the owner of the passport, returns to Ireland and our Saoirse becomes known for her artistic talent, it is inevitable that the truth will be discovered. Her work was accepted for a show in Dublin and it revealed what her young life had been. And despite the fact that her secret cannot remain hidden and that her loved one, Daithi, knows something is wrong, she delays facing the truth, a nearly fatal error. All comes right in the end, but it was so nerve-wracking that I had to keep reading until I knew it would. Another Irish book that had characters willfully pretending the inevitable will not happen was Colm Toibín’s Long Island, a book I loved.
Perhaps the greatest weakness for me in the book is the black and white characters. They all seemed either relentlessly evil or lovable, talented, and full of goodness. Well, there were a few occasions of decency in evidence from unexpected quarters.
The author grew up in the US, moved to Ireland, and has been there “half her life,” as her bio put it. The bio also mentions how fond she was of Donegal, though she lives in Dublin. That was no surprise given how much the characters mention Donegal.
Charleen Hurtubise, Saoirse, Celadon Books, 2026, 246 pages. I read the Kindle version. Available in the public library.