Kerry Hardie

She made me what I am.:

From the time she runs off to marry bad boy Robbie, Ellen is filled with a divisiveness that will define the direction of her life. Seeking to escape the cold judgmentalism of her widowed mother, Ellen flees her demons by flying precipitously into relationships with men. A solitary, taciturn child with flaming red hair, Ellen has never cultivated friends, trapped on the barren islands in an isolation so pervasive that she is held captive by her own dark nature. She has the rare gift of seeing, to Ellen a burden and an unwelcome intrusion, yet another mark of her difference from others, her unbelonging: "If you do not bring forward that which is in you, that which is in you will destroy you."

When Ellen meets Liam in the North of Ireland, she is still married to the wild, sometimes savage Robbie and flees from him to the south with Liam, who is Catholic in name only, but still steeped in the culture of his upbringing. Once settled in her new home, the otherness is more pronounced, the familiar trappings of her Protestant youth replaced by the Catholic south and the mores of this new environment: "Peace it may be on paper, but it's an armed and arm's-length peace."

Clinging to Liam, Ellen is forever at war with her nature, waging a pitched battle at what Liam calls "the Healing", for fear that it will destroy her: "I'm all twisted up inside... I'm doing the best I can." Over time and with the steady support of a friend, Catherine, Ellen accepts her gift and begins to use it for the good of others, all the while conscious of the isolation inherent in her circumstances. Marriage, children, the years pass, her union with Liam settling into the soothing routines of duty, but run aground by Liam's personal crisis, which tests the very foundations of their marriage and their love for one another.

This beautifully wrought tale is a novel of contrasts and revelations, Ellen's lifelong struggle to marry the disparate elements of her inner torment, the centuries-old divisions of north and south Ireland, a country split apart by hatred, and the challenges of a marriage that requires more than Ellen is prepared to give. In stunning prose that evokes the beauty of the country and the profound contradictions of the spirit, the author suffuses her protagonist with the passion of dispossession and a yearning for completeness. The past illuminated by the death of her mother and the present fully realized, Ellen survives her dark night of the soul: "I'm thinking that maybe when you reach that point you can't be anyone but yourself." Luan Gaines/2006.
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