When she gets on board the ship, she befriends a couple from Killarney, the O’Donnells, who are going to meet their daughter in America. At the end of April, Mary says goodbye to her parents and sets off for the port at Cork.
Kate has sent them nothing, which seems awfully cold, since she works as a maid to a mill owner. Mary’s father is pretty bitter about this (as he would be, having lost everything including now both his daughters), but she vows to make enough money to bring her parents over too. So.Īnyway, Nora spends all her time telling Mary stories about mermaids and stuff, and then smash cut to the present where Nora has sent a ticket for Mary to come and join her and Kate. There’s a very brief bit on the first page about how Nora taught Mary English, but this is never spoken of ever again, and while I don’t know how many people in Cork were speaking Gaelic as a first and only language in 1847, Mary’s theoretical English-as-a-second-language never comes up ever again.
They are very slowly starving to death on account of the potato famine, but Mary’s older sister Kate has gone to America two years beforehand to live with their aunt Nora near Boston. Mary is a fourteen-year-old girl from Skibbereen, in the extreme south of Ireland, where she lives with her parents. It’s all very strange and dreamy and kind of terrible all at the same time. My main problem with this book is that Denenberg has created a terribly stereotypical character who even writes using a vague dialect. If you see that name in the title you can probably figure out what my verdict is going to be, but let’s do this anyway. So Far From Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847, Barry Denenberg, 1997. I should just rename this blog “Watch Me Torture Myself With Terrible Books.”
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