DON’T TELL THE GIRLS

Like her dear Nana, her mother’s mother before her, Giff is a gifted sort of seamstress, stitching stories and fancies and family legends with fine threads of fact to construct a fabric of her family’s history. This is a gentle little memoir of that process, full of poignant, sometimes terrible, flashes of discovery. “Start with what you know,” Giff is told, and that she does, inviting her readers to join her as she hunts and gathers glimpses of the past in hopes that they might confirm, connect and converge. From the impetus of a single story to heirlooms, Records Rooms, far-flung homesteads and much-removed relatives, readers become as much entwined in the tales of Reillys and Tiernans and Monahan/Mollaghans as the strands of the Celtic knots that ornament these pages. Dead ends do not deter her; feet of clay do not disillusion her. Persistence pays and her affectionately narrated experience, enlivened by family photographs and memorabilia, will encourage aspiring family anthropologists. (Nonfiction. 9+)