As Christy struggles to find his way amid the more conventional lives of his new classmates, he starts to question who he is and where he belongs.
But still, always, they are treated as outsiders. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling and prepare for their first communions. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother's death in childbirth. Ireland, 1959 Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. If I had a complaint, it would be that I would have liked more to have been done with the travellers’ skill as animal healers after that first great punch of the grandfather calling on Christy’s help in the difficult births of twin colts.A poignant, coming of age novel about an Irish gypsy boy's childhood in the 1950's from the national bestselling author of A Rip in Heaven and American Dirt. Beautifully crafted scenes and characters keep the pages turning. Some of the greatness of Angela’s Ashes dampens these pages, maybe as much as is possible for an author for whom this is fiction, not memoir. When Christy’s father makes one more attempt to settle briefly in order to put the boys in school, Christy, a self-taught reader whose favorite book is The Hobbit, finally has the tools to begin to unravel the mystery of the woman in the photo. He sees it as a message from the dead and realizes the woman in the picture holding a baby next to a strange man must be his mother. On the blowing smoke, an article cut from an old newspaper comes to Christy’s hand. When Christy’s grandfather dies, the boy takes on yet more guilt when he talks his cousin into setting the old man’s soul free by burning it in his caravan. The guilt he carries for killing (he is told) his mother when he was born burdens not only him, but prohibits the whole family from settling down even long enough for Christy and his cousin to get any sort of education or to prepare for their first communion, stretching an even wider gulf between them and the settled folk. Young Christy Hurley is a traveller, a Pavee gypsy, who migrates with his father and extended family around Ireland in the late 1950s.
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