Children of the Rainbow

"A sometimes beautifully written, running tale of life in the village of Cloone, in the Ireland of 1925- told by a young boy of twenty. There is no plot, save the continuous thread of the growing love between Ches MacMamara, the narrator, and a girl named Madcap O'Neill, but the same characters are carried throughout the book. Ches is sometimes agonizingly, sometimes joyously in that limbo between childhood and maturity, and the writing is full of his insights to those around him and into the individual he is to become. His personality, like that of most of the villagers, is a mixture of puckishness, bravado, pride, loneliness, and a quick flashing wisdom. What drama there is in the book (though it is almost completely without dramatic effect) comes from the clash and interplay of personalities. Teasing, searching dialogue, a county fair, pre-dawn salmon poaching, a dance, these are the incidents on which the book is strung and their significance derives from the purely personal factor. Ches deeply loves his village and its people and though he is sometimes self-conscious and sentimental about it, he communicates much of this feeling. The book is somewhat reminiscent of How Green Was My Valley but its appeal will probably not be as wide for the story lacks the cohesive focus of that book."--Kirkus« Less