It has always been a tricky business, being fourteen, but for Nan Cantwell, caught between the transmogrified world of the nuns at school and the cheerful chaos of a home dominated by a bully of a father, a frail, silent scrap of a mother and the ebullient Nellie, who cooks, cleans, and hauls the girls towards adulthood, it sometimes seems downright impossible. The sequel to Home Rule sees chez Cantwell spinning out of control as catastrophe, both financial and emotional, strikes - but things change, and in the end the girls, at least, achieve an uneasy truce with the realities of 1920s Dublin. Boylan strikes a note that is totally her own: mischievous, affectionate, punctuated by stabs of pain which vanish in an instant, like shadows in the sun.
