Marita Conlon-McKenna
Autor de Bajo el espino. Los niños de la hambruna (A la Orilla del Viento) (Spanish Edition)
Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: via Goodreads
Series
Obras de Marita Conlon-McKenna
Bajo el espino. Los niños de la hambruna (A la Orilla del Viento) (Spanish Edition) (1990) 376 copias
Sturmkinder, Endlich ein Zuhause 2 copias
Sturmkinder, Aufbruch nach Amerika 2 copias
Obras relacionadas
Thicker Than Water: Coming-of-Age Stories by Irish & Irish American Writers (2001) — Contribuidor — 49 copias
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Anna’s enthusiasm for new experiences—sport, defences against the sídhe, pottery—is very engaging, and she is both kind and thoughtful. The atmosphere of Fairy Hill is very attractive. Anna watches a heron fishing by Starling Lake, learns horse-riding, enjoys food, and attends a family get-together. At the same time, though, the descriptions of place are sometimes oddly generic. Anna seems to enjoy herself, though there is some lack of consistency in her reactions, as she jumps from enjoyment to boredom and back again.
The story itself is a little slow to start, and transpires to be the story of changelings, children stolen away by the sídhe of the fairy-fort. The disruptive intrusion of the ousted world of the intangible, the world that can only be spoken of in compromised terms of superstition, fairytales, is well-handled. The threat comes close to Anna’s family, and she is able to recruit her great-aunt Lily to help. Lily recalls a time when those who believed in the sidhe would deal with them respectfully—showing respect to that which is very ‘other’. She is also able to offer practical help in negotiating with the sídhe.
The family dynamics, though, strike extremely uncomfortable notes. Anna’s anxiety to ‘fit in’, and her acceptance of responsibility for other people’s feelings, is exploited by her father, Rob, and her stepmother, Maggie. They assume that they can use Anna as unpaid child-minder to her baby stepbrother, obliging her to play with him and help him to eat; her father tells her that this is ‘what big sisters are for’. Her stepmother is sharp with her when she makes a mistake, laughs at her first attempt at using a pottery-wheel, and suborns her into helping at the market-stall. Distressingly, Anna internalizes the role that is laid out for her: she accepts that she should fit in and be nice. She feels guilt at being ‘selfish and irresponsible’ for not taking better care of her stepbrother. Frankly, by the time Anna has been emotionally manipulated into accepting that she will only be loved if she is an obedient girl, it is hard to see exactly why being stolen away by the sídhe is such a bad option.
The effective eeriness of the sídhe’s intrusions and threats are balanced by the cheerful, friendly ambiance of Anna’s visits to, and explorations with, relatives. She repeatedly encounters the past, too, through her grandmother’s diaries, Lily’s memories, and meeting the mysterious, lonely Daniel. This ruffling up of time adds subtlety to the tale, especially as the excitement and pace increase around the final encounter, when Anna must brave the dangers of the fairy-ring. The landscape is excellently rendered as a borderland between worlds: the familiar becomes unfamiliar; everything might be more than it seems, and Anna must understand the natural, as well as the ‘other’, world if she is to succeed in negotiating with the sídhe.
If the reader can set aside the quick-witted and brave Anna’s recruitment into the performance of sexist ideology, this is a lively, atmospheric adventure, somewhere between the waters and the wild of Yeats’s 'The Stolen Child' and the hostile forest of Stevie Smith’s 'Little Boy Lost'.… (más)