She joins a road crew, but her first period surprises and unmasks her, stirring unwanted interest. She lucks into work helping to herd cows, but betrayal and murder await down the drovers’ path. Their time together is cut short when he is swept away in a teeming river as they try to salvage a drowned sheep. Grace is soon joined by her irrepressible brother Colly, 12, who gives her a few lessons in maleness. She cuts the girl’s hair, dresses her as a boy, and sends her off to seek work. When a blight hits the potato harvest of 1845, a pregnant widow with four children seeks to spare her 14-year-old daughter, Grace, from hunger, maybe, but certainly from the appetites of her own insatiable lover. A gifted Irish author offers another take on his country’s Great Famine through the eyes of a teenage girl as she travels through a land wracked by want.
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