Pagan Dances of Caherbarnagh
 Bridget Horan O'Mahony
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Educare Press
  ISBN: 0944638287
Amazon's price is: $14.95

Memories of home & summer lakes near Dingle, Ireland. Children growing up on a farm in the Old Country, learning to dance & socialize.

Pagan Dances of Caherbarnagh is a collection of stories, spun from the fabric of a young girl's memories of her musician father, her homemaker mother, their farm, her sisters & the passion for dancing that overtook the young men & women around her village, before rock & roll rumbled over the hills. The dances of her childhood were performed “...at the verge of the mountain, [on] a concrete platform -- enough to dance four sets of six couples. We had a small gable-end window upstairs in our house and that's where we girls crouched to watch and listen to the dancing and the music.”

A woman, now settled in Seattle, tells us, in the brogue, of A Day in the Bog turning sods, when a son with his father, watch as his sister Mary make her grand entrance on the back of their horse.

In The Old Country story, she is just nineteen, in New York on a student visa, & earning money for university “back home.” She meets Joe, a doorman to an apartment building; an Irish exile who never married & was then “close to retirement.” He befriends her, takes care of her & yearns for the news she brings from “home.”

Murphy's A Pub is a hilarious story of a Seattle bartender who asks a waitress to look his mother up when she goes to Ireland. Naturally enough, American Andrea knows nothing about the Old Country except that she wants to find a husband there & bring him back. Except she confuses Scotland with Ireland & thinks she has accomplished her errand when she speaks with a woman in a pub near Cork, where the neon lights in its window illuminated a national brand of beer.

Aer Lingus is the story of a modern immigrant -- heartwrenching & lyrical.

Letters from Home are from family about family. Simple, insightful & so very understated, describing the trials of those left behind.

Spoonbill Hibernicus tells a detective story of the missing spoons. Who takes them & why will leave you smiling.

In The Waxen Red Rose we hear the music inside a musician's head, & the memories inside a daughter's.

Pagan Dances of Caherbarnagh is a breath of fresh air, from a time long gone, about people out of their element, yearning with nostalgia for what once was & is now, only memory.

Charming, enchanting & a memorable read!
(04/28/02)

Rebecca