Review: What the Wind Knows

What the Wind Knows What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not really sure why, but I do love a good time travel novel. Maybe it's because I'm always wondering what it might be like to live in a different time, a different place. (How much of who I am is based on me and how much is based on the time I grew up in?)

This book draw me in quickly. Anne Gallagher is a novelist whose Irish grandfather raised her, taught her Gaelic, told her the stories her learned in childhood, influenced her more than anyone else.

He instructed her to take his ashes and spread them in Ireland after he died. She rents a boat and finds herself in 1921, spending time with her grandfather, who was orphaned in the Rising, a rebellion against the English. She looks like her great grandmother, and everyone assumes she is his mother. And she is falling in love with her great-grandfather's best friend.

Harmon tells the story through the eyes of her protagonist, Anne, her hopes, her fears, her disappointments. She weaves in historic details of Ireland's conflict with England and the hope for freedom.

The ending was not unexpected, but it wasn't obvious. And that's the best. I felt like I knew Anne, her grandfather, the time period. I saw, I experienced the past with her. I was conflicted along with her. Should she stay in the past? Move forward to the present? Is there one choice that is better?

And of course, there are no definitively right answers. That is life.

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