Super Rave review of LIGHT OF THE DIDDICOY by Eamon Loingsigh on NewWorldReview
“It’s high time for a new and boldly authentic Irish-American voice in literature, and that voice belongs to Eamon Loingsigh.”
So begins an incredible M.J. Moore review of the magnificent 2014 book LIGHT OF THE DIDDICOY by Eamon Loingsigh. Check out the full review on NewWorldReview.com.
M.J. Moore is particularly full of praise in his depiction of the book and its place in contemporary literature. “Unlike the bulk of historical fiction that oftentimes makes exclusive use of an omniscient narrator with an all-encompassing point of view, Eamon Loingsigh has done something startling here. He has begun his novel in the first-person singular, and thus we’re engaged right away by a tone, a perspective, a mood, and a personal voice as compelling as that of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises or Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.”
He also is impressed with Loingsigh’s treatment of spoken language: “Most compelling of all is that Eamon Loingsigh has made tremendous use of his gifted ear for dialect.The colloquial daily speech of that era’s “great unwashed” (with wildfire locutions, fractured grammar, animated slang, and pungent profanity), wafts up off his pages with zeal.”
In case you’re wondering, LIGHT OF THE DIDDICOY is the brutal saga of Irish-American gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront in the early part of the twentieth century, told through the eyes of Irish immigrant Liam Garrity. Forced at age 14 to travel alone to America on the eve of the 1916 Easter Rising, Garrity stumbles directly into the hard-knock streets of the Brooklyn pier neighborhoods run by Bridge District gang The White Hand. In the industrialized enclaves where Famine Irish settled a generation earlier, Garrity has no choice but to use any means necessary to survive within the clan-like loyalties of the gang, and carve out his place in a no-holds-barred world of a community living outside the law. For more on the book, and its author, click here.
LIGHT OF THE DIDDICOY is available directly through us here at Three Rooms Press.
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