June 24, 2024
Irish mythology and impish humor collide in Donohue’s ambitious sixth outing (after The Motion of Puppets), a supernatural thriller about a 2,000-year-old woman who rises from the dead. One morning, farmer Michael Mullaney sets out for the nearby peat bog to dig turf he can burn for fuel. Instead, he accidentally unearths the remains of a young woman with a rope around her neck, her throat cut, and her skull bashed in. Mullaney realizes he may have made a major archaeological discovery and stashes the woman’s body at his home—where she comes to life and identifies herself as Fedelm, a prophet from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúalinge. This delights Mary Catherine, the teenage granddaughter of one of Mullaney’s friends, who considers herself and her two closest friends amateur witches, and causes commotion in the Connemara countryside, which soon populates with warriors and royal personages from Fedelm’s past who seek revenge against her. When an American scholar arrives to catalog the commotion, the teenage witches conspire to help Fedelm evade capture. Donohue crowds the narrative with literary allusions and crude double entendres (a team of track and field athletes are “always bragging about the size of their poles”), sometimes at the expense of coherence and character. Still, there’s enough audacity and invention on offer to satisfy. Agent: Peter Steinberg, UTA. (Aug.)Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the author’s previous book and misstated the total number of books he has published. The review has also been updated for clarity and accuracy.