Et cetera : What We're Reading: Time of the Child

For this month's Adventures in Bookclubbing 'Holiday' theme I read 'Time of the Child' by Niall Williams. The story takes place in Faha, a small community in Ireland during Advent Season, 1962. This is a slow, moving story, best for lingering over on cold winter evenings.

In the first third of the book we are introduced to a broad cast of characters, with some foreshadowing of what is to come. A little under half of the way through a young boy finds an abandoned infant while waiting for his father outside of a pub late one night. The infant is unresponsive. His father hasn’t made as much money as he had hoped he would at the Christmas Market, and is drowning his sorrows while the boy waits. Knowing he can't trust his father in this emergency, the boy brings the infant to the local doctor, Jack Troy, who is highly revered in the community. Troy is a widower and lives with his unmarried daughter, Ronnie, who assists him in his medical practice. The baby survives, and it soon becomes clear that Ronnie would like to keep the baby. However, as an unmarried woman she and her father know she would not be eligible to adopt the baby. They keep the baby a secret while trying to develop a plan. The story continues from there as we learn the fate of the baby, and the impact this child has on their household and the community as a whole.

Ronnie has dreamed of being a writer since she was young, but as she has grown up her writing has changed. On page 124 we read: 'Day by day, in Ronnie there had dissolved her girlish idea of writing a novel called The Troy Sisters, and instead she had fallen into a habit of seeing in Faha the full of humanity, in its ordinary clothes.' This sentence best describes the book as a whole, humanity in its ordinary clothes. I loved it, and the ending left me breathless.

This book currently has 4.23/5 on goodreads.com, and is available at the Vinton Public Library in both regular type and large type.

Happy reading,

Kelly