Galway Bay, by Mary Pat Kelly

'Tis far away I am today from scenes I roamed a boy, And long ago the hour I know I first saw Illinois; But time nor tide nor waters wide can wean my heart away, For ever true it flies to you, my dear old Galway Bay. -F.A. Fahey, Galway Bay

Too often when I pick up a book at school nowadays, I'm picking it up because if it's fiction I need to read it for class or if it's non-fiction I'm reading it for research. I've advanced into reading non-fiction books for fun, which is probably a bad thing, so it's not often that I read fiction books I don't have to take notes on and annotate copiously.

Over the summer I've had a chance to change that and read a little bit more fiction, probably because the selection of fiction at the three libraries I frequent when I'm at home is a lot better than the selection at school. A friend of my mother's recommended Galway Bay to her when she found out I was soon to be studying there, and like the good bookworm I am, I borrowed the book from Mom before she had a chance to read it.

It was a wonderful read. I plowed through it in three days, which is a testament to both my ability to plow through books (already aptly demonstrated) and M.P. Kelly's ability to tell a story. And what a story! It starts in a very small village in Ireland before the Great Famine, with a young woman named Honora who is thinking about becoming a nun until she meets Michael Kelly, a very charming young man with a gorgeous horse, a knack for telling stories, and dreams that are just as big as Honora's. Kelly then follows her heroine through the famine, five children, and immigrating to Chicago, a place whose history I know and love well.

This book comes highly recommended by me as well as a slew of much more famous voices, including Frank McCourt's, and it's not terribly difficult to follow or keep track of Honora's many family members. Historically interested types may want to take note of this novel as an interesting way to experience family history -- Mary Pat Kelly based the story on her own family's experience as Honora herself told it to her granddaughter, Agnella Kelly. I also loved the stories within the story told by Honora and her grandmother and the way those stories had such a centrality in thier lives.

But this book was interesting to me for another reason; Honora came from Galway and went to Chicago, and here I am, twelve days away from leaving Chicago and going to Galway. She went on foot and by boat, while I'll go by plane and bus and automobile. I'll probably see many towns that were once like Honora Kelly's, and that makes me really happy inside. I feel, in a very small way, that I'm adding to that story even though I'm not Irish and my people never had to flee a country because their crops were rotting and their government wasn't helpful and their landlords wanted them gone.

Who knows? Maybe this will inspire me to find out what the great-grandcesters of Mercury Gray were doing way back in the day in France and Germany and wherever else we came from!