GREENER GRASS

Fourteen-year-old Kathleen (“Kit”) Byrne relates a first-person account of life during the Great Hunger of 1845-50 in Ireland. Living with her mother, father and two younger siblings, she works as a scullery maid at the manor of Lord Fraser until the devastating potato blight reaches County Wicklow and swiftly erodes her family’s marginal ability to survive. Aided by Lizzie, a wise woman with a touch of second sight, Kit matures into her family’s only provider. Pushed by the rapidly deteriorating situation, she makes a poor—and rather surprising—choice to try to stop Fraser’s brutal overseer from evicting her family, a somewhat implausible plot device that seems designed only to add suspense. Although the author weaves in many of the horrific details of the famine, she less effectively captures the voices of its victims. Dialogue in a modified dialect does not ring quite true, and Kit seems oversophisticated for her impoverished, uneducated background. Other characters are not fully developed. Purchase for audiences that enjoyed the much better Nory Ryan’s Song by Patricia Reilly Giff (2000). (historical note) (Historical fiction. 11-14)