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Maybe someday
48
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
28/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Kerri nà Dochartaigh
Publisher:
Milkweed Editions
Date:
April 12, 2022
Kerri nà Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of townâalthough for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like nà Dochartaigh's, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape. Nà Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone's throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in.
What The Reviewers Say
Deeply personal but also expansive in its empathy with others who have suffered even worse.
Assured and affecting.
Can the Irish border be described as a ‘thin place’? Never have I read such an eloquent description for the omnipresent border in our psyche.
[This] hybrid book attempts to hold the reader in place between two contrasting genres: nature writing and Troubles memoir. It is an often precarious balancing act, the two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by the vividly descriptive prose.
