Two Irish cottiers, Bridget and Tommy, battle a pernicious enemy of old for the lives of their friends and families against the backdrop of the Irish famine. The ancient gods want Ireland back under their control through the power of an Iron Age revenant and a cauldron with the converse abilities of life and destruction. But the youths find out that their true enemies are not just the age-old forces but also, the landlords and their agents who want to replace their culture with profitable sheep and biddable collies. The Land of the Young is a sweeping fantasy and adventure set in the Celtic age of mythology and the 1840s.
Two Irish cottiers, Bridget and Tommy, battle a pernicious enemy of old for the lives of their friends and families against the backdrop of the Irish famine. The ancient gods want Ireland back under their control through the power of an Iron Age revenant and a cauldron with the converse abilities of life and destruction. But the youths find out that their true enemies are not just the age-old forces but also, the landlords and their agents who want to replace their culture with profitable sheep and biddable collies. The Land of the Young is a sweeping fantasy and adventure set in the Celtic age of mythology and the 1840s.
Chapter 1
The Azure Sea
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Johanna could hardly make out the port of Howth as she gazed east across the Irish Sea, her hand shielding her dark brown eyes from the recently revealed sun. The weeping and keening families on the shore were now a memory, replaced by the calls of gulls trailing the ship like a cloud of pleading beggars, but there were still souls with red eyes and leaky noses on board.
Johanna Dempsey was one of them. She did not wish to leave her home, her parish, her townland, her country—nor the man whose smile she loved as she loved the brightness of the moon or the blue of the sea. But not this sea. This was one of exile and sorrow.
But here she stood; nauseous and bitter en route to Liverpool on a leaky vessel that would be hard put to sail across a landlocked lough.
Why did she go?
Her father was desperate. Ireland had become his loadstone, and it was crushing him body and soul. He had no more fight. He had been informed on by a defector from the community for an unremembered grievance and the bailia and driver targeted him. Her once proud father could no longer feed his family and his youngest son Martin, her brother, had recently died of the fever that had scythed through the land of famine-weakened souls. The defeated patriarch bitterly accepted the pound compensation and passage as her life-long home was torn apart before their eyes by drunken, singing crowbar-men.
But at least they still had each other, she thought while descending below. She looked to find her family in the heaving mass of Irish cottiers and hogs bound for the Liverpool market mashed into a stinking hulk that still smelled of cac and urine from the last batch of exiles, both pig and person.
There she found her sweet mamee singing to her siblings, sick from the motion of the boat. The family crushed up next to them, the Quinns, joined in. The ship was also singing in creaks and pops as it bucked and buckled from the crests and troughs of the restless sea.
Her da stared off into nothingness, fretting about the future. But their future now looked dimmer as the sea became troubled, the wind stressing their too-worn rigging as the waves smacked the neglected, barnacled hull.
A gale roared, the sea rolled, the hull heaved—a foremast snapped, striking the deck; passengers screamed as it pierced the ceiling. A maelstrom was upon them as Lir sought to take them into his smothering arms.
Then the hull cracked, and a sickening sound of the boat being torn in two met their ears as the ocean rushed in. Johanna embraced her family while the Erin’s Star slipped below the surface, the screams of the passengers silenced by the smothering sea. An air pocket kept some of the passengers alive, but it was only a temporary respite as they hit the bottom, three hundred feet below.
Johanna’s lungs filled with the briny depths and her body rose through the mast-made hole, rising above deck and hovering in the deep indigo. She heard a distant voice whisper: Awake from your mortal dream.
Her last thought was about cauldrons that never emptied and feasts that never ended.
The Irish Sea swallows a boat exiles as they flee to Liverpool. A starving boy named Tommy meets an Englishman travelling across the unnavigable Irish townlands, discovering that he's lost his horse in a bog. A vocal, vibrant young woman named Bridget is determined to get her family a reprieve from the threat of eviction. The people of Ireland are living in poverty; starving and dying from the fever. The English Protestant Landlords are punishing in their determination to get their rent, despite the fact that the blight has ruined most of the crops. With no crops, there's no money, and it's the tenants who suffer. As it turns out, some distant members of Bridget's family were on the boat that sank in the Irish Sea, and she's determined that her closer family won't face the same fate. When she angrily takes a walk, she happens upon Tommy, and the two decide to go and find the Englishman's stricken horse.
Possibly, one of the most charming factors of The Land of the Young is the use of 'Irishisms' (for want of a better term). Bridget, in particular, is the epitome (if not slightly clichéd) Irish woman. She talks - a lot - barely stopping for breath as she prattles on about whatever subject is forefront in her mind. As I was reading her monologues (and even short quips), I couldn't help but hear an Irish accent similar to how Marianne Keyes sounds in my head (imagine Mammy Walsh from any one of the Walsh family novels from Keyes, and you're there. Albeit, Bridget is a lot young than Mammy Walsh). She was a joy to read, even if she did leave me gasping for breath at times.
However, at times, the narrative wavered from perspective to another, with no warning. It was a bit disorientating, but Robinson writes so beautifully, that it can be overcome.
Well worth a read. Just try and push past the long sentences and the occasional confusing switching from view points.
S. A.