Grace - A powerful story about discovering your purpose and finding true happiness.

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Her younger brother Colly follows her, and together they find themselves thrust into an unwanted adventure in an Ireland that knows only hunger and desperation. It’s so, so good. I nearly missed my train stop!’ – Zoe Ball, The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, BBC Radio 2, interviewing John Simm who plays Roy Grace in GRACE on ITV

Naomi’s narration has an air of wistfulness, veneration for life and motherhood, projecting the eternal nature of man toward love, even among the seemingly endless expressions of hate. Every step forward is faced with tragedy. Each piece of good fortune tainted with two more of bad. Grace is continually pummeled with the brunt force of life. She learns that the only thing worse than hunger, is the cold. ""Cold is the truest state of all things and heat is a temporary nature. The cold does not burn itself out in rush like fire but waits with unlimited patience." At the beginning of 2010 his life as the Yeatsian “public smiling man” brought him low at last. Writing on 30 May of that year, again to his friend Seamus Deane, he confessed: “I have been in a doldrum for a good while now. No writing. No confidence. Low barometer.” But he got himself out of depression, as four years previously he had recovered from a stroke – his friend, the playwright Brian Friel, who had suffered a similar mishap, greeted him in hospital with the words: “Well, Seamus, different strokes for different folks, eh?”Mentre scrivevo questo commento avevo nel cuore la delusione di aver letto una «bella» storia scritta in modo eccessivo. Finito di scrivere però mi rendo conto che, a prescindere dallo stile barocco, che non amo; a prescindere dagli artifici retorici molto cinematografici ma ormai abusati anche sugli schermi (il fratello Colly), la storia di Grace mi è entrata dentro, anche se raccontata in modo freddo, a volte impersonale. E questo mi fa pensare che le due stellette che volevo inserire possano risultare poco indicative del reale gradimento. Quindi ne metto tre, ma convinto che riducendo gli eccessi di stile il libro avrebbe avuto una marcia in più. Josey, was born with white skin and blonde hair.....then gets taken away by a free slave. Naomi was murdered seconds after Josey’s birth. Ohne Kennzeichnung der wörtlichen Rede ist „Grace“ ein eigenwilliger Roman, der es seinen Lesern nicht leicht macht, zwischen Graces Erlebnissen zu unterscheiden und dem, was sie – zutiefst abergläubisch – von Colly zu hören glaubt. Zeitweilig habe ich mich gefragt, ob Colly seine Schwester wirklich begleitet, ober ob seine Stimme ihr als imaginärer Begleiter auf ihrer Wanderung zur Seite stehen könnte.

It was fun to read about a character who used words like “afflicted” and “wrath”. There aren’t many contexts where a Middle Grade character could use this dialogue and make it work but it really does here and it is rather endearing. There are also many references to bible stories which make this book really great for discussion and exploring Christian beliefs.Grace is nearly dead when she is rescued, then must find the strength to escape her rescuer and return home. The book ends with Grace, age nineteen, the famine over, pregnant and living with a man she trusts, with hope for the future. On this last point, Reid remarks that “the sheer outward-facing busyness” of Heaney’s life, as man and poet, “called for equally busy footnotes”. In fact, there is no sense of busyness here. Reid’s method is to leave the letters themselves clear and cleanly readable, then attach the necessary explanatory matter at its end, often in no more than a few deft lines. The result is an uncluttered text that is a pleasure for the eye as well as to the mind. Some say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die . . . It’s more than just seeing the moment, it’s taking part in the memory as if it were happening again. And when you in the flash, you don’t even know that what you’re seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it.” The beauty of the composition is even more heartbreaking in the tragedy of the story. These are beautiful words describing a horrific time. The harshness of what Lynch describes only soothed by the balm of the words used to describe it. The main character, however, was a runaway slave woman named Naomi and the story is told by alternating chapters of her voice and those of the other characters.