Lily O'Connor | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This vivid memoir of a childhood in the 1930s and 1940s Dublin is marked by its narrator's consciousness of her states as an outsider, for Lily is a child of a mixed marriage, baptized a Protestant but living in a Catholic community. The originality of this account of an lrish childhood is its portrait of a spirited girl coming to terms with her difference. At first she simply does not understand why she cannot receive the blessings of the priests and nuns which they convey somewhat hanghtily upon her Catholic playmates. She yearns to be the same as other children: to have holy pictures and statues, altar lamps and a holy water font: to wear a lovely new white Communion dress. At its heart, however, this is a universal story of a childhood; of hardship and joy, of violence, poverty, pleasure, humor and, over all, humanity.