My publicist Krista Soukup of Blue Cottage Agency recently asked me to read and review The Irish Girl by Ashley Sweeney, another Blue Cottage Agency author. I found it exceptional.
The Irish Girl‘s exquisite descriptions, vivid characters, and gripping storyline transport’s readers to a time and place where one misstep spells disaster. A Great Read! I recommend to Historical Fiction lovers especially those interested in Irish Immigration. Here is more about my fellow Women Writing the West and Western Writers of America author, Ashley Sweeney and her latest book:
From multi-award-winning historical fiction author Ashley E. Sweeney comes a family saga about the Irish immigrant experience spanning New York, Chicago, and Colorado so compelling that, USA Today best-selling author Kelli Estes says, “I read this story in one sitting.”
Feisty and resilient, thirteen-year-old Mary Agnes Coyne travels alone from Ireland to the United States in 1886 in Ashley E. Sweeney’s newest, The Irish Girl.
Forced from her family home after an accusation of incest, Mary Agnes endures an arduous sea voyage across the Atlantic with only a few pounds to her name and a letter to a parish priest. From the tenements of New York to the rough alleys of Chicago, Mary Agnes once and again suffers the bitter taste of prejudice for the crime of being poor, Catholic, and Irish.
Faced with another tragedy, she moves west to Colorado to begin life anew and there ponders her future.
Filled with lilting prose that Kirkus Reviews calls “poignant . . . vivid and compelling,” Sweeney again introduces a strong female protagonist whose experience mirror those of many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they carved out a home in new land.
She Writes Press
December 10, 2024
Length: 344 pages
ISBN13: 9781647427764
Pre-order at:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Target
BookShop
and your favorite bookseller!
Ashley Sweeny is a multi-award-winning author. Her previous novels, Eliza Waite, Answer Creek, and Hardland, have won a total of 17 awards, including the Nancy Pearl Book Award, Independent Press Award, WILLA Literary Award, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Sweeney, a native New Yorker and graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, spends winters in Tucson and summers in the Pacific Northwest.
Thank you, Ashley, for a wonderful read!
Candace
One Response
It’s an awesome review by Candace Simar that captures the heart and soul of the main character, Mary Agnes as she strives to carve out her niche in America..