Amid the lushness are direct stabs to remind us that Grace isn’t just a story set long ago. Lynch’s lush, poetic prose deliberately and painfully acts as a foil to the reality of the famine. Grace is a tale of misery, but it’s not a misery memoir. Grace is a story of the Great Famine, but it’s not narrowly political. Grace is a story of ghosts but it isn’t a ghost story. When you’re starving, Lynch seems to be asking, are you truly alive? Without resorting to make-believe, he carefully and inexorably explores the confusion. We care about Grace and her companion, her young brother Colly, but what grips is the merging, through grief and desperation, of the dead and the living. Lynch goes where only famished dogs should go, and it’s a measure of his skill that he keeps us with him all the same. Through its young heroine, we experience all the describable and indescribable horrors of the Irish famine.
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