Summary: Coolbar, Ireland, is a village of secrets and Shell, caretaker to her younger brother and sister after the death of their mother and with the absence of their father, is not about to reveal hers until suspicion falls on the wrong person.

Everything's been wrong since 15-year-old Shell's Mam died. Her father forces his kids to say the rosary and then gets drunk. They live from money he skims off donations he collects for the church. Shell is left to take care of her younger brother and sister in their Irish village; her only joy comes in stolen moments with a local lad.

The novel could have gone several ways, but perhaps because it is based on a true story, its path is unexpected. A dead baby is found, and the authorities, thinking it is Shell's, accuse her of murder. Moreover, the authorities suspect her own dad is the baby's father. Or perhaps the baby's father is the new priest.

A lovely book with a believable ending.

Rash, better known for his poetry, won the 2002 Novello Festival Press Literary Award for the manuscript of this compelling first novel. The plot combines a love triangle and a murder. From the beginning, you know who done it and, soon enough, why; the mystery is in the disappearance of Holland Winchester's body. Rash uses this plot device successfully by dividing the novel into five sections, narrated by the sheriff, the wife, the husband, the son, and the deputy. Each perspective reveals more about the characters and their motivations and actions while exploring themes of love, infidelity, revenge, justice, and fate. The conversations tell the thoughts and superstitions of various family members, neighbors, and the local witch to create the Appalachian South immediately after World War II. Beautiful writing -- it's easy to see he is a poet. This is a book I could reread just for the nuances of language. A quiet storm of a book.

This book is the first by this author that I have read. I really enjoyed the book up until the last chapter and just didn't like the way the book ended. I suppose I was looking for something more and it didn't materialise.

Blurb:
Walking through new-fallen snow in the forest near their home, twelve year old Nicky Dillon and her father come upon something inconceivable there, in the pristine winter scene, an abandoned infant wails, its survival made possible only by the coincidence of their having chosen this path for their evening stroll.

One of this talented author's lesser efforts -- I read everything by Anita Shreve, but this one did not measure up.

Not long before Christmas 1983, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father Robert, walking in the woods near their house in New Hampshire, come across a baby girl wrapped in a bloody towel, the remnants of her umbilical cord still attached. They race her to the hospital, she survives, and the police launch a hunt for the parents. The Dillons' discovery opens the still-fresh wound inflicted on a mid-December day two years earlier when Nicky's mother and one-year-old sister Clara were killed in a car crash. Robert fled Westchester with his daughter, hoping to escape their memories in rural isolation. When the infant's 19-year-old mother turns up, he doesn't want to have anything to do with her, but he finds he can't turn her in either when a convenient fainting spell and blizzard trap Charlotte in their house. Looking back on these events at age 30—for no evident reason except to give us some reassuring flash-forwards at the close—Nicky mingles the gradual unfolding of Charlotte's story (the rotten father exposed the baby and lied to her about it) with her memories of Mom and Clara and her worries about Dad. A sympathetic local detective's gradual closing in on Charlotte provides the not-very-suspenseful plot movement. The whole tale seems contrived, right down to Nicky's climactic, too-pat confrontation with her father. "Are you just trying to stay sad? To hold on to Mom and Clara?" do not seem like the insights of a 12-year-old. Everything is too easy here, including the fact that we never meet the boy who actually left the newborn to die, so readers can feel comfortably sorry for everyone without having to grapple with any messy moral issues.

I believe this was the first book by Shreve that I read. It was an intense read about a girl that leaves her baby out in the woods to die and the family that comes to take care of it. We had a good discussion about it in my book club.

As someone who's interested in natural childbirth, I thought this might be useful. I'd heard positive things about the method from online forums. But the book kind of makes you feel like if you feel any pain or feel any worries, you're failing. I liked the Birthing from Within approach a bit better - worrying during pregnancy is natural! But I did like the visualisations on the CD that came with the book and found them very relaxing.

This book is another book focussed on actually giving birth. There was a bit too much information on birth art for my taste, as I didn't find it all that relevant. However, I think that the portions that deal with actually coping with pain and so on will be useful closer to the big day. I'll also recommend some chapters to Julian.

Kitzinger is an anthropologist who's been writing about pregnancy and childbirth for decades, often critically. This book is another great general reference text - lots of focus on homebirth and waterbirths as well.

A really interesting perspective on pregnancy and childbirth; for those interested in such things - this is a really positive, exciting book filled with a can-do attitude. Kitzinger is an anthropologist, but it doesn't read like that. The idea of a pregnancy book being positive might seem like an truism, but many are filled with ridiculous warnings about all sorts of rare disorders that can crop up, which do little to put women at ease.