The tale opens when young teen Grace is snatched by her mother, Sarah, who roughly chops off Grace’s hair so that she will look like a boy. With prose that is often indistinguishable from poetry, Lynch brings readers inside the unfathomable and wretched suffering of that time, but does so with such crystalline sharpness, using precise language and gorgeous imagery, that the beauty of his prose rubs off on the scene, adding a tiny glimmer of mercy and redemption to what is otherwise unbearable - though ‘redemption’ is probably too strong a word. Yeats didn’t pen the famous phrase “a terrible beauty” to describe Ireland until well after the years of the Famine, that line echoes and reverberates throughout Paul Lynch’s haunting and flinty 2017 novel of that tragic time period, Grace. Literary Criticism, originally published in Reading Ireland
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