Carson, Ciaran - Bernadette Murphy (review date 18 October 2001)

Bernadette Murphy (review date 18 October 2001)

SOURCE: Murphy, Bernadette. “Under Enchanted Irish Tea's Spell.” Los Angeles Times (18 October 2001): E3.

[In the following review, Murphy notes that the reader will fall under Carson's spell in Shamrock Tea, even though the book never comes to much of a conclusion.]

Go back in history to the time of St. Patrick, who's said to have brought Christianity to the Celts, and you'll find why the Irish imagination is so supernatural, filled at once with saints and faeries, herbal cures and holy water.

On the one side is the ancient world of pagan ritual—bonfires and wee people, giants and banshees, a realm of magic and mystical understanding that are part and parcel of everyday life. In this sphere, myriad worlds exist contemporaneously separated by the thinnest veil from what we perceive as the “real” world. The Christian culture, which Patrick brought, steeped like tea in...

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