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A review by wordsofclover
The Hungry Road by Marita Conlon-McKenna
4.0
The Hungry Road starts off in the 1840s, as the potato blight strikes Ireland and Irish people, particularly poorer tenants living off the land found themselves without any food to eat, and no words or acts of kindness by their English and Anglo-Irish landlords. What came next was mass starvation, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Irish people dying - in their beds, on roadsides, in workhouses, as well as mass emigration to England and America. Ireland's population fell from 8.5 million to 6.6 million.
In The Hungry Road, we follow Mary - a young mother desperate to keep herself and her children alive, as well as her husband. Dr Dan, a young doctor in Skibbereen who despite doing his best to help the starving, can only watch the sick die as little to no help comes from the higher authorities and then Fr John Fitzpatrick who can only pray for the sick as they reach out to God to help them.
This book is definitely a good one to read if you liked Marita Conlon-McKenna's previous book on the famine, Under the Hawthorn Tree. In The Hungry Road, we are following adult characters but the level of horror and destruction was the same in this book as MCM didn't hold back in her children's novels about the terrible state of Ireland at the time.
There's a lot of hopelessness in this book, and the journey of the characters and the plight they had to go through was really what hooked me in this book. The characters themselves were extremely simple, and there wasn't a lot of nuance to them and there were certainly no big plot twists or surprises with the characters either. But it was the Famine coming to life that hooked me, and the years of wasting away, and of struggle and the absolute cruelty and uncaring showed to the people by their landlords. How they still asked for rent when people didn't have food to eat, let alone sell, and then decided to evict everyone near the end and force them on a book to England and America, even if the people didn't necessarily want to go. They didn't really have a choice. It broke my heart.
I think this book would be a good starting point, as well as Under the Hawthorn Tree, for adult readers looking to expand their knowledge on the Famine era (and understand why some Irish people are still bitter about it, and reject to the insults that people throw about Irish people being 'potato eaters'). I think it's so important for people in England to really understand their country's role in Ireland during the time, and the lack of care that was shown to the Irish people and how millions were left to suffer and die. Children became skin and bone while Irish grain and livestock was exported to England. How does that ever make sense? It never will. I'm not saying something wasn't done to try and make things better, but certainly not enough.
I think Mary's story in this book was most interesting, and she certainly was the most to suffer and lost the most. I preferred her struggle and her strength over the story of Dr Dan and Fr John. I think the latter two were good to have for a simple comparison between the classes of people in the town - Mary had to kill a dog that attacked her, and in desperation used its meat to feed her family, while Dr Dan came home to a bowl of beef stew and dumplings, and often had dessert. Fr John always has something nice to eat thanks to his housekeeper while his parish starved outside his door. Fr John's POV didn't really bring much to the story at all, and if it had been removed wouldn't have made a difference.
I really felt Mary's homesickness and grief for Ireland when she is forced to emigrate. Her family's time in New York certainly seemed to be much easier, and possibly slightly unrealistic but also there were people who thrived so maybe not. Again, the description of the coffin ships - similar to Wildflower Girl - really upset me and thinking about the people who died in terrible conditions when they thought they were on the way to a better life is just heartbreaking.
This story is a simple one. It's a novel of hunger, and fight and survival. But it still gripped me and I wanted the Sullivans to survive, to fight their hunger and overcome. For the story itself, I would probably give a 3-stars but because of the extra emotion I felt, I bumped my rating to a 4-star.
In The Hungry Road, we follow Mary - a young mother desperate to keep herself and her children alive, as well as her husband. Dr Dan, a young doctor in Skibbereen who despite doing his best to help the starving, can only watch the sick die as little to no help comes from the higher authorities and then Fr John Fitzpatrick who can only pray for the sick as they reach out to God to help them.
This book is definitely a good one to read if you liked Marita Conlon-McKenna's previous book on the famine, Under the Hawthorn Tree. In The Hungry Road, we are following adult characters but the level of horror and destruction was the same in this book as MCM didn't hold back in her children's novels about the terrible state of Ireland at the time.
There's a lot of hopelessness in this book, and the journey of the characters and the plight they had to go through was really what hooked me in this book. The characters themselves were extremely simple, and there wasn't a lot of nuance to them and there were certainly no big plot twists or surprises with the characters either. But it was the Famine coming to life that hooked me, and the years of wasting away, and of struggle and the absolute cruelty and uncaring showed to the people by their landlords. How they still asked for rent when people didn't have food to eat, let alone sell, and then decided to evict everyone near the end and force them on a book to England and America, even if the people didn't necessarily want to go. They didn't really have a choice. It broke my heart.
I think this book would be a good starting point, as well as Under the Hawthorn Tree, for adult readers looking to expand their knowledge on the Famine era (and understand why some Irish people are still bitter about it, and reject to the insults that people throw about Irish people being 'potato eaters'). I think it's so important for people in England to really understand their country's role in Ireland during the time, and the lack of care that was shown to the Irish people and how millions were left to suffer and die. Children became skin and bone while Irish grain and livestock was exported to England. How does that ever make sense? It never will. I'm not saying something wasn't done to try and make things better, but certainly not enough.
I think Mary's story in this book was most interesting, and she certainly was the most to suffer and lost the most. I preferred her struggle and her strength over the story of Dr Dan and Fr John. I think the latter two were good to have for a simple comparison between the classes of people in the town - Mary had to kill a dog that attacked her, and in desperation used its meat to feed her family, while Dr Dan came home to a bowl of beef stew and dumplings, and often had dessert. Fr John always has something nice to eat thanks to his housekeeper while his parish starved outside his door. Fr John's POV didn't really bring much to the story at all, and if it had been removed wouldn't have made a difference.
I really felt Mary's homesickness and grief for Ireland when she is forced to emigrate. Her family's time in New York certainly seemed to be much easier, and possibly slightly unrealistic but also there were people who thrived so maybe not. Again, the description of the coffin ships - similar to Wildflower Girl - really upset me and thinking about the people who died in terrible conditions when they thought they were on the way to a better life is just heartbreaking.
This story is a simple one. It's a novel of hunger, and fight and survival. But it still gripped me and I wanted the Sullivans to survive, to fight their hunger and overcome. For the story itself, I would probably give a 3-stars but because of the extra emotion I felt, I bumped my rating to a 4-star.