|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Book Description
The O'Connell Boy: Educating “The Wolf Child” This Irish-American memoir, written for adults, provides lively impressions of the author's early “wolf child” life in two homes run by Irish immigrants. Following family tragedies, the O'Connell Boy is uprooted from his Irish grandmother's house and brought by his father to a Catholic Charities group foster home in Norwood, an "Irish ghetto." With wit and a sense of irony, he tells his unusual story of nine years with several other orphaned boys under Mrs. White's "reign of terror." The strong-minded Irish widow is a perfectionist housekeeper with a fierce temper and a rigid moral code. Using vivid dialogue and descriptions, O'Connell paints candid pictures of life under his guardian's strict Catholic control, tells of escaping to "the woods" to perform primitive rituals, and describes his sex education by outrageous older boys at Norfolk Golf Course's "caddie shack." Also, he weaves in the boy's fundamental anxiety about the unknown life of his terminally insane mother, whose mysterious absence haunts his young psyche. The author's Irish grandmother, Johanna O'Connell, enters the memoir in depth when he is age 14 and returns to her home "on the other side of the tracks" next to the East Dedham Railroad Station. His teen years there are a "battle of wits" with the old woman who calls him one of the "brats o' today." Another strong-minded solitary female, she had left her husband, bought her own home, and taken her children to the other side of Dedham to separate herself from Grandpa Dan O'Connell's alcoholic excesses. The boy’s exposure to Johanna during high school leads him to think of her as a "character" from another era. She is a born storyteller, and his memories of her are provided in earthy dialogue sprinkled with candor, humor and affection. A laissez faire homemaker, she has neither the energy nor the motivation to curtail his teenage pursuit of unlimited freedom. O'Connell delights in delivering Johanna's extreme views on the English, Winston Churchill, the world at large, and the neighbors. Addicted to the news media, especially the radio, she provides a steady supply of Irishisms such as "May his soul rot in hell forever, God forgive me for saying it." Her apathetic approach to cooking, diet, and using modern utilities, is the opposite of the life he led for nine years with Mrs. White. Having experienced "lace curtain" Irish life with Mrs. White, the boy is now from "the other side of the tracks," and though he finds his substandard environment irksome, he is living as a free spirit. And for “the wolf boy,” freedom is his most precious possession. The O'Connell Boy's world in blighted East Dedham is centered around his pals and "The Square" with its rundown stores, taverns, dilapidated tenements, and pool room. His “lone wolf” life is a blend of youthful sexual confusion, inner insecurity, and outer bravado. This fresh and original memoir is a mix of frustration and laughter, contradiction and paradox. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © 2007 by Sanctuary Unlimited. Dennisport, Massachusetts U.S.A. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
