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.

Phillips’s writing has long been infused with big ideas and a scathing analysis of American greed, corruption, and racism.

Ní Dochartaigh’s deep connection with nature aids in her recovery, manifesting on the page as a rich combination of autobiography and natural history.

This book...is one of those multifarious non-fictions that do well at the moment; mixing memoir, nature writing and cultural history in one unified narrative.

Thin Places combines memoir with nature writing, history and politics. The form allows ní Dochartaigh to explore her past, illuminating a path to where she is now.

How does a person contend with coming from a place where suffering is part of its legacy? For the author of this memoir, it’s through acknowledging the mysteries and beauty of the natural world and spending time in its liminal spaces, something she learned about through her grandfather, a natural storyteller.

... luminous and achingly honest.

Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her.

There is a heavy darkness over much of this memoir.

... demonstrates that she is in possession of the gift of storytelling, using it to explore how and to what extent our place of origin informs our identity.

An evocative memoir about surviving the Troubles.

Poetic.

Ní Dochartaigh set out to weave together a personal narrative in combination with historical facts and descriptions of the natural world, but at times the chapters failed to mold together in a sequential order. The book skirted on a thin place of understanding ní Dochartaigh’s past and trying to grasp Ireland’s traumatic history, shifting from personal anecdotes to extended sentences on the powers of nature..

This spiraling eco-memoir presents both the geopolitical history of a place alongside personal story and reflection, and it successfully documents the somatic impacts of long-term political conflict while acknowledging the natural world as a potential source of healing.

There’s very little levity here, but much poignant intensity.

Deeply personal.

Nimble.

Luminous.