GOD MADE LITTLE APPLES

Returning to his monastery from a day of begging in Dublin, 70 year old Brother Bernard suffers a stroke, is taken to a hospital and spends his remaining days recalling his youth on a poor Donegal farm and his life as a lay brother. Some of his recollections have to do with the exact day-to-day way in which his family lived, the food they ate and how it was prepared. Other memories concern various people he knew at different stages of his life and how they affected him. His was an uneventful life marked by no dramas, hardly a soft life but cushioned at least by the expectation that he would always be taken care of. He dies an easeful death surrounded by more solicitude than a man might expect who only did his job and said his prayers. John Sheridan writes in a cloying, stage-Irish way which, apart from the books informational value, is only irritating.