Publisher's Weekly Review
The bracing sea air brings little pleasure to the year-round residents of Castlebay, a village on the coast of Ireland, where class lines are strictly observed and morals publicly monitored. The youngest daughter of a shopkeeper whose meagre living depends on summer trade, Clare O'Brien is determined to move beyond her present circumstances. Hard work and the guidance of an irreverent, caring schoolteacher bring the resolute scholar to a college in Dublin. There, her steps falter when she enters into an ardent affair with David Power, the son of Castlebay's only doctor and another willing exile. Although David returns her love, their devotion is sorely tested when they are forced to marry and return home. As a wealthy, new-fledged doctor, David easily resumes his privileged position, but Clare is trapped between her mother-in-law's cold fury and the town's unease. Sharply drawn, memorable characters and a convincing picture of a small Irish community bring freshness and zest to a familiar tale. Binchy also wrote Light a Penny Candle. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild alternate; first serial to Cosmopolitan; paperback rights to Dell; U.K. rights: Century Publishing; translation rights: Christine Green. January (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Light a Penny Candle (1983) was Binchy's full-bodied, chewy tale about two women and their wavering marital and sexual fortunes; this more upbeat, but equally warming novel takes place mostly in an Irish village, and parallels the struggles of two women (from 1950 on) to shake off the shackles of family obligation and small-town hierarchical mores. ""You could get anywhere you wanted, Clare,"" says spiky, irreverent ""spinster"" teacher Angela O'Hara to ten-year-old Clare O'Brien, her student at the convent school in the small resort town of Castlebay. But not easily, Angels would agree, for like Clare, Angela had come from a poor, uneducated family--uneducated, that is, except for her cosseted brother Sean, a priest and apple of his mother's eye. Sean is a missionary in Japan, while Angela cares for her crippled mother. Clare is one of a shopkeeper's family of six, where for girls, homework ranks a low second to peeling potatoes. How nice it would be to live in a house like that of doctor's son David Power--with books and calm and a place to read! During the summer, townies and the upper crust mingle and there're some wild goings-on in a cave with David, his friend Nolan, and curiously attractive photographer's son Gerry Doyle--and local girls, like Clare's coarse sister Chrissie. But Clare sticks to her aims, and Angela will tutor her on to glory via two scholarships. Clare is increasingly drawn apart from her family, although she will eventually unburden herself of the crushing knowledge that brother Tom--illiterate, crime-prone--is in a London jail. And Angela's ""poor, stupid fool"" of a brother Scan has left the priesthood, married a Japanese woman, sired two kids. Angela must now both protect her mother and protect Scan from Castlebay. Angela and Clare find love, and after cliff-edge emotional crises (in Clare's case, disillusion and a night of terror), discover at last a belonging and a comfortable acceptance within dreams deferred and reshaped. With a generously peopled locale that quickly becomes the reader's home town, and dialogue that fairly purrs off the page, a comfy companion to Light a Penny Candle, and bound to be as successful. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This romantic melodrama, set in an Irish seaside town in the Fifties and early Sixties, is as wholesome and engaging as the author's first novel, Light a Penny Candle ( LJ 2/15/83). Memorable characters include a poor shopkeeper's daughter who wins a university scholarship, only to miss final exams by a cruel twist of fate; a medical student who shocks his family by marrying ``beneath him''; a lonely schoolteacher who guards two scandalous secrets about her local celebrity brother; and a kindly, ubiquitous priest who knows all, tells nothing, and holds everyone together. It's a little slow to get into, but by the halfway mark the reader is fully involved in all the subplots and is turning pages nonstop. Recommended for most public libraries and for YA collections. Literary Guild alternate. Joyce Smothers, Ocean Cty. Lib., Toms River, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
