Because I once lived on the western coast of Ireland, and because author Lisa Carey moved to the island of Inishbofin, off Ireland's west coast to research her first book, I've been following her career for many years. I've loved each of her four Irish-themed novels, and eagerly awaited the February 7th release of her latest, "The Stolen Child."

It is a story much like Ireland herself: deceptive in its riddled nuances, more than the sum of its parts. The soul of the story creeps up on you. It takes patience and willingness to allow the magic to take hold, and when it does, it is not by possession. "The Stolen Child" spins the kind of magic that lulls at the core of your being; it affects your consciousness, waits for you to piece it together until you understand. There is little overt in this languid novel, which, again, is much like Ireland. It is a desperate story through and through, yet in the hands of author Lisa Carey, it resonates with mythical beauty, gives you a sense of timelessness, and holds you fast by its earthy, brass tacks.

In pitch-perfect language, Carey wields dialogue specific to the west coast of Ireland’s desolate environs. It is an understated language, upside down to outsiders, but once your ear attunes, you are affronted by the superfluousness of other tongues. All primary characters in "The Stolen Child" are women. They live cut-off from the mainland of Ireland’s west coast, 12 miles out, upon rocky, wind-swept, St. Brigid’s Island, during the one-year time frame of May 1959 to May 1960. It is a timeframe fraught with the looming inevitability of the islanders’ evacuation from their homeland, with its generational customs and ties, to the stark reality of life on the mainland, with its glaring and soulless “mod-cons.”

Most of the characters are conflicted about leaving the island, save for the sinister Emer, who has her own selfish agenda, centered upon her only child Niall. Her sister, Rose, is the sunny, earth-mother, unflappable sort, who only sees the buried good in Emer, whereas everyone one else on the island shuns her, for her malefic, dark ways, which they intuit as dark art. Emer has one foot on the island and the other in the recesses of the fairies’ manipulative underworld. It is the American “blow-in,” Brigid, the woman with a complicated past, who has her own ties to the island from her banished mother, that cracks the carapace of Emer’s guarded and angry countenance. Together, the pair explore an illicit relationship, but when it snaps back, Emer retaliates with a force that effects the entire island and twists her worst fears into fate.

"The Stolen Child" is magnificently crafted, for it is a sweeping story set on a cloistered island, which has nothing to recommend it save for its quays, its view, and its eponymous holy-well. This is a novel rife with character study that is quintessentially Irish, yet applicable far afield. In themes of motherhood, hope, desperation, and hopelessness, the characters take what little they have and wrestle it into making do. It is the power of steel intention that drives this story, and the reader receives it from all conceivable angles. I recommend "The Stolen Child" to all who love Ireland, to all who love an exceptional, creative story, and to all who love language used at its finest. All praise to the author, Lisa Carey. I eagerly await the next book.