The protagonist emerges as a girl of acute sensitivity who suffers more than her share of fear and guilt. She fears everything from lockjaw to the Druids, from being kidnaped to the imagined death of her mother. Some of her fear is related to sex and results from her religious upbringing. She is shocked when she sees young couples embracing outside a cafe, and when her cousin exposes his chest to her she is overwhelmed by thoughts of sin and the Devil. It is nakedness which she fears most of all.

Her religious nature is clear throughout: At one point, she experiences what she hopes is religious ecstasy, and later she sees herself with Jesus in a vision. She devises the most unpleasant forms of penance for herself, with the simple logic of the child: “Everything you did was the opposite to what you wanted to do.”

Her embrace of the sisterhood is therefore no surprise, particularly when it is remembered that throughout the story she is closer to women than to men. Almost all the men she encounters are threatening figures. She cannot, for example, bear her father’s attempts to kiss her: “You told yourself that you were not experiencing anything and in that way you didn’t.” At one point, she even fears that her father may try to seduce her. In contrast, she feels extremely close to her sister and to her mother.

Her father is an experienced farmer and a local peace commissioner, which causes him to boast that he has influence in the community. Yet he is also a vulgar man and a poor husband. Often drunk, bad tempered, and abusive, he gambles while his wife struggles to make ends meet, and he often threatens her with violence. In contrast, the wife is long-suffering and self-effacing. Her habit of always giving herself the worst parts of the Sunday chicken dinner is typical. As a remedy for the lack of love in her life (even though she refers to love as a dope), she carries on an illicit affair with the village doctor, a man who is more often drunk than sober.

Emma is the black sheep of the family, the complete opposite of her sister. She has airs “because she was born in New York.” Called a “fashion plate” because she changes her clothes before each journey, she is thoroughly attuned to the worldly life of New York, where she is so popular with the bus conductors that she rarely has to pay her fare. After the birth of her baby, she is impatient to return to America and quietly insists on living her own life, without parental interference.

An assortment of odd minor characters, many of them sketched with deft economy by the child’s observing eyes and ears, helps to bring the story alive. Chief of these is Ambie, “who lived in your house but was always ready to go.” Roaming from pub to pub, cheating at cards to win a turkey, cheating again when he sells his winnings, acquiring candy for the young girl who adores him, called “yahoo” “plebeian” and “aborigine” by the lady of the house, Ambie is the archetypal lazy, likable rogue. Then there is the schoolteacher Miss Davitt, tall, skinny, and too intellectual (at least in the child’s view), passionately interested in politics but eventually falling victim to her own highly strung temperament and drowning herself in the river.

The protagonist

The protagonist, an intelligent, imaginative, sensitive, ten-year-old, pubescent schoolgirl in the superstition-ridden, legend-haunted West of Ireland. She is never given a name except “you.” In...