In Between Worlds: The Journey of the Famine Girls
The year is 1845 in a small rural Irish village called Skibbereen. Margaret Gaffney and her brother, Sean, aged five, live with their parents who are potato farmers.
The family don’t have much, but they do have food, warmth and a rented home. Their Dad found an old map in the street which is their mother’s prized possession. She and Margaret, known as Maggie, pretend to visit the places on the map when her mother wears her best Sunday shoes and prophetically, they do visit Australia. Then the potato blight comes and devastates the entire family.
For the first year, they hold on to hope that the crop will grow again, but it doesn’t. In one of the most brutal scenes, Maggie and Sean’s mother is killed while trying to build a road to earn money for food. The rest of the narrative is hauntingly painful. Maggie’s father’s last act to bring her and Sean to the workhouse, where they are to pretend to be orphans in order to be entitled to food, will stay with this reader for a long time.
Later, believing Sean to be dead, Maggie decides to embark on an epic journey to Australia, via the Earl Grey Scheme for colonial immigration. Will Maggie survive, and what will her new life hold for her?
The human suffering caused by the Irish famine is little known, and this book will remedy that in all its cruelty and horrifying detail. It pulls no punches and entices the reader so deeply into the narrative, you cannot help but continue to the very end.
