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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781413449921
ISBN number: 1413449921
Label: Xlibris Corporation
Manufacturer: Xlibris Corporation
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 324
Printing Date: November 19, 2004
Publishing house: Xlibris Corporation
Sale Popularity Level: 2779970
Studio: Xlibris Corporation
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Rated by buyers -
This is part memoir and part fiction. I will write this review carefully so as not to reveal too much of the plot as I don't want to spoil the book for those who haven't read it yet.
The time is just after World War II, and Ireland is a poor place economically. Many Irish must leave their homes and travel elsewhere to find a living, and 13 year old Ellen, knowing the necessity of leaving, dreams of going to America where her true life waits for her, a place where everybody has a nice house with a white picket fence, or so she imagines. When we very first meet Ellen she is running to the top of her favorite hill in Donegal so as to look out upon the water toward the horizon, to dream of her future life. A happy life, she imagines, albeit an ordinary one. She just wants to raise her own family, have her own happy home and marry a wonderful man, a man who will be her Forever Love, a wonderful man like her father.
Ellen lives with her family on a struggling farm, just outside of the small town of Moville.
Ellen's brother Jim, as a teen, is a prankster who, with his friend Sean, will, in the books early chapters, pull off a practical joke (against the town bully) which will make the reader laugh out loud just as it makes the congregation at Saint Mary's Church laugh out loud. (While the priest can only look on in shock and awe at what occurs in front of him during his Sunday sermon.)
The title "Wind and shadow" refers to the legendary Irish demon, the pooka, which takes the form of a terrifying grey steed when it materializes but otherwise is nothing more than wind and dark shadows. Ellen Rawdon's father, a storyteller of the very first order, has told his children many of the Irish tales including the legend of the pooka. Once upon the back of the demon steed, the rider cannot get off until released, staying there as if glued on, and must endure a terrifying (and usually killing) ride until it is over. All the time the demon is mocking the fear and injuries inflicted upon the rider.
There is much of the Irish traits and legends peppered throughout this book, and some of Ireland's history as well, including a brief talk of "The Great Hunger", the ordeal of the entire nation during the famine that killed so many.
Dreams may or may not come true, as we all know. Shortly after we meet Ellen her father is found to be with incurable cancer. A death sentence. And God ignores Ellen's pleas to make her father well. Instead he gets sicker and sicker. Ellen is forced to question her concept of God's goodness. Maybe God doesn't like her? Or maybe she is saying her prayers all wrong?
Her father passes on and life on the farm becomes harder, and some of the heart and soul goes out of the family. Her mother is heartbroken. Still Life goes on. Work on the farm must be done, money to pay the bills must be earned.
Other changes and sorrows follow before Ellen at last makes her way to New York City. Carraher, in describing Ellen's excitement and fear in making the transition, in leaving her home for what she believes will be the last time, captures perfectly the sense that many immigrants must feel when leaving (out of necessity) a home they love, the only home they know, to come to the land of opportunity where dreams can still come true. A wonderful land, but a foreign one still.
More pain and personal tragedies await her on the other side of the ocean, although Ellen doesn't know it yet. There will be personal triumphs and joys as well. For life will be lived by Ellen in all its complications and sorrows, in its mistakes and successes. In the book, the demon pooka (besides being a great tale in and of itself) serves also as a metaphor for living life. As Ellen realizes on a sad day, isn't life like the demon steed, taking you up on its back for a destroying ride, while mocking all the pain and fear it inflicts upon the rider? Isn't Life like that? Well, at times it is.
This is a novel about the extraordinary that is contained within the life of an "ordinary" person, an ode of sorts to the common person most of us are.
Carraher asks in the book's introduction: "...how many "common miracles" reside in what the chroniclers of history deem ordinary? How much excellence of the human spirit sits outside the "great events" of our times, outside the cloth-bound covers of the archives that sit gathering dust on our bookshelves? Isn't there much unheralded grandeur in the world?"
In "Wind and Shadow" Philip Carraher has tried to capture life's universals of strength, of struggle, of joys and forgiveness, of the astounding "common" endurance of so many who suffer great pain and heartbreak, as each of us must at some time, and he has succeeded in doing exactly that. A wonderful book.
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