O Come Ye Back to Ireland - Our First Year in County Clare

O Come Ye Back To Ireland by Niall Williams and Christine Breen

Travel memoirs are some of my favourite books, especially those about moving to a distant place, full of observations about the new country and the people and way of life there. I've come across very few that weren't wonderfully entertaining. 

Niall had lived in Ireland as a child, and Christine's family had history there as well. Uprooting from New York and settling in rural Ireland would be a dramatic change of lifestyle, but to both it felt like "going home" in some ways. On arrival the practicalities of life were quick to displace any romantic idea of country life they'd carried with them, but through all the ups and downs - and there were such downs -  their determination and the generous help of their salt-of-the-earth neighbours, carried them through.

From learning how to cut peat for their winter's fuel, dancing at a ceilidh and starting a local theater group, to raising (and having to slaughter) their own chickens, they paint a picture of Irish country living that made me alternatively envious and dismayed. But, oh, the wonderful people. You could live anywhere and face anything with good-hearted people like that around you.  

Persistent heavy rain and fog darkened their first summer (the worst summer in decades, the radio told them), and I admit to finding those chapters of rain after rain after rain a bit tedious in the reading, at the same time feeling guilty for even thinking that. I had only to read it while they suffered real hardship that summer. The only excuse I can offer is that similar dreary conditions outside my own window the entire time I was reading this book had me longing for sunshine somewhere.  

I did enjoy spending this time among the lovely people and places I've always wanted to visit. Though my travel book shelf is already crammed and I have to be picky about what can stay and what must go, this one will stay.