Rating: 
Summary: Hell is a Hard Place to Leave When You Know Your Way Around.
Review: I was eager to read this first novel by the fiercely honest and compassionate author of Are You Somebody? I should warn you that I am drawn to stories about messy human beings who, even in their middle years, have not settled and are still hanging in there and hoping for wisdom and happiness, however that translates to the individual. O'Faolain provides us with a rich cast of characters, many of whom have haunted me long after reading the novel. The author's forte is writing candidly about family relationships, and the De Burca family in My Dream of You is particularly well imagined.O'Faolain's heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is introduced as a woman who has finally realized that she must make some significant changes in her life. She is mourning the sudden death of her beloved colleague and friend, Jimmy. This great loss awakens her to the reality that she is also grieving the disconnection she feels with her surviving family members. And Kathleen is mourning her middle aging and the dearth of passion in her life. She tells us early on, "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God:everything fell into place around it." Throughout this novel Kathleen's casual acceptance of sex with anyone who offers is therefore believable, but not always easy to read about. As demeaning as many of the experiences seem in the cold light of words, Kathleen is always ahead of the reader in her hard and often humorous self judgement. It isn't the sex that interests her. It is the hope for Passion. She believes that her life in London has become a dead end and decides to leave a very good job as a travel writer to strike out on her own as a writer of an historical novel based on the Talbot Judgement requiring her to return to Ireland. The return to Ireland and Kathleen's research into the Talbot Judgement and the history of the Ballygall area during the Famine initially lead her to write a passionate and rather torrid imaginary account of the Talbot affair, the novel within this novel. Ireland also brings Kathleen home in the best sense of the expression. Growing up, the child of an angry father and a weak, incapacitated mother caused her to wonder if the Famine, "something that had happened more than a hundred years ago, and that was almost forgotten, could have been so terrible that it knocked all the happiness out of people." The engaging cast of characters she encounters while researching the Talbots and the Famine, all help Kathleen to slowly see herself reflected in a more hopeful light. Kathleen De Burca finds the beginnings of an answer to the happiness question. She already knows that hell is a hard place to leave when you know your way around. She discovers that to be especially true concerning the hell of shame and self loathing. It is human nature to attach oneself to an idea and assume that as an identity . Kathleen is a heroine who figures that out and takes a leap, and though the ending is left open, one hopes she has found the self respect that is needed to live wisely and to finally become a person that she can be proud of. I found this book entertaining and agreeably thought provoking. Nuala O'Faolain explores important questions of personal responsibility and the importance of one's history both literally and in the univeral sense. I am in awe of O'Faolain's use of words to paint vivid settings. Kathleen De Burca's travels, her basement flat, the TravelWrite Office, Ballygall, all become real places through O'Faolain's descriptions. You don't just visualize these places. O'Faolain gives you the smell, the sound, and the feel of place. She honors Ireland both past and present with a sensitive reflection of the Famine and of the survivors. Yet this story is universal. Suffering is an unfortunate fact of life. This ambitious tale of a woman's search for happiness reminds us that we must not attach ourselves to suffering. As Kathleen De Burca discovers, forgiveness is necessary to move forward and "to see ourselves as precious. Just for having existed!"
Rating: 
Summary: excellent
Review: This book was excellent. A great mixture of historical fiction, romance, and insight. I couldn't help but underline passages to recite to my friends.
Rating:
Summary: PROVOKES STRONG FEELINGS
Review: After finishing this book and lending it to a friend with my highest recommendation, I kept returning to my book corner, longing to pick it up and continue the story, and wishing that it hadn't ended. This book is one of my very favorites from the past few years, and one of the very few that I plan to reread. I was surprised to find some of your reviewers hated the book. For that reason I am going to recommend it to my book club, because a more interesting discussion usually takes place when there is disagreement over the merits of a selection.
Rating:
Summary: A lonely woman travel writer finds uncomfortable parallels.
Review: Kathleen DeBurca is on a quest, or rather on simultaneous quests. One is to come to terms with her lonely life, the other is to solve the mystery surrounding the divorce of Lord Talbot from his adulteress wife during the latter 1800's. The setting is Ireland and its tumultuous history during and post the famine years. Kathleen leads the willing reader to a number of possible scenarios concerning the infamous divorce. Was his Lordships's wife innocent, a schemer, wronged and lonely, or cunning? Kathleen meets a cast of charming characters in the village to which she travels and holes up as she tries to unfathom the answers to her historical mystery. Documents are discovered by the local librarian (another charming addition to the multiple-layered tale) in the village's library that allows Kathleen to change her estimation of Lady Talbot; then still more is discovered and the possible scenarios change again! The story is peeled away layer upon layer and it's easy for the reader to wish Kathleen would "get on with it" when it comes to her own personal dilemmas, so that the Talbot plot can be once again re-entered and solved. But it is because of the episodic "finds" in the local town that the tale remains intriguing to the end. A fine read!
Rating: 
Summary: Archie Bunker goes to Ireland
Review: I've often wondered why people found a fat, brainless, rude, emotionally abusive and bigoted man named Archie Bunker so amusing. I could never watch 'All in the Family' for more than 2 minutes. But millions did and it shouldn't surprise me that there are so many glorious recommendations for this book. The main character is so self-absorbed in her pathetic, empty and immoral life. I tried reading this book for my book club but had to stop about half way through. This book is torture and a complete waste of time. Maybe it's that Archie Bunker syndrome that there are so many people out there who really enjoy the idea that someone else's life is as bad if not worse than theirs.
Rating: 
Summary: For 500 pages, I expected a little more....
Review: I got halfway through this book and was tempted to stop reading, but since I had already invested 250 pages I thought I would finish it. I was a little put off by the lack of quotation marks that make it hard to determine who was speaking at times. Kathleen was such an amoral character that it was hard to relate to her. And after all the expenditure about the Talbot case, I expected a little better resolution to that story. Not recommended.
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Summary: Cross-pollination of a journalist's essay and a memoir
Review: Once upon a time, there was a middle-aged, unmarried Irish lady, who spent most of her life in London, as a journalist, working for a traveling magazine. Having severed her relationship with the Mother Country, her relatives, she drifts through life seeking happiness, and not being terribly successful in that quest. On the spur of the moment, she decides to make a substantial change in her life, and make some use of her writing abilities, and fictionalize the old story of love between an Irish pauper and an English landlady in the dark times of the famine. That story wasn't quite of the Cinderella quality, because the Cinderella himself was a man, to be sure, and second, because there wasn't really much to tell, no fairytale to expand on, and there was no happy end for both lovers. As might be expected, although not hoped for, the fictionalized romance was essentially a journalist's essay, suffering from wordiness, and skimming only the surface, despite the effort put into the retelling. I am sure that Nuala O'Faolain is a talented person, however, as this book clearly indicates, her talents lie quite elsewhere, not in mainstream fiction. She has a keen observational sense, that much is evident, however, with a scope of work as wide as this one, she somehow cannot escape the occupational hazard, and the book, or at least the relatively small part dealing with the romance is not much more than an essay, which delivers about as much essence as a long magazine article would. Famine - how much there was to tell, how much to discover, or rediscover, rather - from a new perspective of the XXI century, from the point of view of a lady of Irish heritage, who knows the ins and outs, the charms and peculiarities of the country. Unfortunately, the topic is just barely touched, as if common decency dictated to at least put a threadbare skeleton of a setup. There is not much to learn from this book in this respect. Instead, the fictionalized story of the Talbot divorce case is a pure romance of the flesh, so to speak. The author is clearly interested in the carnal dimension, her writing reflects that tendency, and when all is said and done, the whole literary adventure seems to be quite bland. So many words, and so little essence. Then there is the second dimension of the book, the memoir. In scattered bits and pieces, the narrator tells us the story of her life, what are the current aches and pains, with the events of the past unearthed if only to provide an explanation for the current, miserable state of affairs. The lady repeatedly tries to answer some basic set of questions, circling around and about, and finishing as confused as she started. Perhaps there is no simple answer to questions like this, so perhaps she shouldn't be blamed for not having offered us a reasonable, robust and sound explanation. Why is she alone, why there was only one person she was able to attach herself to emotionally, and in fact that man, her colleague, has never been her lover, while at the same time she never refused anyone else, who bothered to ask, or even slightly hint at? Why did she hurt everyone who loved her, where did this force come from a force that transformed her life into a series of carnal adventures, some uplifting, some grim, and some utterly forgettable, why? She does not know. I don't know either. This book is a memoir of a confused lady, that's what it is, and it's intriguing to read, no doubt, but somehow the confused state of the writer seems to be contagious. So much has been written, and as a reader, I am deeply confused. I regret that I haven't been able to extract more from this book, perhaps I am too young, and my personality hasn't evolved enough for me to be able to understand the musings and anxieties apparent in "My Dream of You". On the other hand, I have an impression that the author's attempts have turned out to be too shallow to be memorable, her quest toward discovery of what it means to be Irish is never definitive, full of slogans and stereotypes, nothing to be fond of. If you would like to read a real work on that topic, you might try Edna O'Brien or Alice Taylor, and last but not least, the great son of the Emerald Island - James Joyce.
Rating:
Summary: More of a disappointment than a dream...
Review: After reading some of the overblown reviews, which reference feminism, self-discovery, and the crossover between literature and love, I was expecting something along the lines of A.S. Byatt's "Possession." Instead, this book was the depressing tale of a woman who is unable to say no to dreary and squalid sex (at one point her elderly lover takes out his dentures to take her to bliss) and the historic/tragic love affair she is researching is even less interesting. The protagonist has the inner life of a blank page and the dead woman she identifies with is equally tepid. Her flashbacks to a difficult childhood are supposed to illuminate her distance from the world and those inhabiting it. Instead, they seem to be an oversimplified and awkward technique that takes the reader back to a past where our heroine is as featureless and unexplained as she is in the present. I hate to be harsh, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Introspective commentary on the depth of human spirit
Review: Upon first selecting My Dream of You, I was cautious and unsure about my enjoyment of the work I had selected. As the first pages whisked under my eyes, however, my fears evaporated like mist on a sunny spring day. O'Faolain's ideas are introspective, contemplative, profound, and unendingly moving. The chapters of the book flow as if sewn by a seamstress of unparalleled skill and demeanor. We face many decisions in life. Important among those are purchasing decisions: how are we to spend the income for which we work so hard? Purchasing My Dream of You constitutes one of the wisest decisions a person can buy. Get this book. You won't regret this book.
Rating:
Summary: A good growing-into-yourself book
Review: This book starts slow. In fact, it is kind of slow all the way through. However, this fits the novel. Kathleen is a travel writer who has spent her life traveling and hiding from her past. When her best friend Jimmy dies suddenly, Kathleen is left without bearings--no one for her really to turn to in times of trouble. However, she remembers a 150-year old divorce case she read many years ago, and decides to investigate it. Throughout the novel, Kathleen comes to many conclusions about her past, her family and her relationships with men. She comes to these conclusions through her investigation of the Talbot case. I didn't think that I would be able to complete this novel. However, about 1/3 of the way through, I became engrossed in the various stories in the novel, that I couldn't put it down. I would highly recommend this novel, but make sure you give the beginning enough time to resonate within yourself.
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