Let Go the Glass Voice 

by 

Maureen McCafferty

       An Irish maze-mystery that will entangle you with Nora as she tries to unravel the deaths and births in her family tree. As she tries to escape the machinations of a domineering and evil grandmother who never reconciled with leaving Ireland.

ISBN 0-942979-28-1, quality paper, $9.95

ISBN 0-942979-27-3, cloth, $19.95

Excerpt from the book:

I.   The Daoine Sidhe

 and Some Ancient Family Cures

     When Nora Cavanaugh was about five, her mother and grandfather started telling Nora about God. They had different reasons. And they had different gods. Nora’s grandfather had friendly gods: the ancient Celtic spirits—the daoine sidhe, the shadowgods of the earth who loved song and dance like Granhugh, Nora’s grandfather. The shadows had and wanted no powers but the ones Granhugh, Hugh Logan, had and wanted too: transformation and healing. In Granhugh’s stories, the shadows healed sorrow by transforming people, usually into birds. “And then the world was theirs,” Granhugh always said, envying such boundlessness, maybe the only thing he ever did envy; at ninety-one he still hated boundaries, of all kinds.
    Nora listened to the shadow stories carefully enough to know that the birdpeople were the lucky ones. There were also stories of pigpeople who didn’t fly or escape. Nora’s grandfather heard these stories from his own father, Mick Logan, who heard them from his father and mother when he was a boy in County Monaghan, in Ireland. Like his fathers and mothers before him, Hugh Logan is a seanachai, a storyteller, a transformer of the world around him. “We knew the shadow world because we lived near a ringfort, the shadows’ burial ground, holy ground, you see,” Hugh Logan told his granddaughter. He wanted Nora to know the world he came from, which was the world she came from too, even if she’d never seen it. He told Nora that even the things she could see wouldn’t be the whole story or always easy to understand.