The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan: A Novel of the Civil War

This is a rather unusual book about a young girl named Mairhe Mehan who came to the U.S. from Ireland. She lives in an Irish slum in Washington, D.C. with her brother, Mike, who's working on helping to construct the Capitol dome.

She works at an Irish bar and gets along there well. Things change for the worse, though, when her father basically goes insane, destroying almost everything in their home. Her brother volunteers to fight for the Union Army, going off and leaving her alone. She lives upstairs over the bar, now, and her father in a church that was converted into a hospital.

She also has the "second sight," that is, she can psychically see things happening and this "gift" provides her with one of her darkest moments.

There's a lot in the novel about what's going on in the Civil War, and everything that goes on in her own life is described in a fashion which makes it easy to form mind-images of the events.

There are a couple of places where the story gets a little confusing at times, shifting from one scene to another within the space of a paragraph or two, but it still all fits well together. This may not be the happiest book to read, but it's still worth reading.


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