Star of the Sea: Rating: 4 stars

Ireland: where the problems aren’t limited to famine.

Star of the Sea (Joseph O’Connor)
Written by Joseph O’Connor
Fiction · Drama
Reviewed August 31, 2007

This book fell into my lap at the perfect time; I had just finished Kept and was watching The Hanging Gale, and this book fit neatly between those two in both tone and subject matter. Set during the Irish Potato Famine, the main action of the book takes place entirely on a ship, with flashbacks telling the back story and setting up what is obviously going to be some very unpleasant business. As a mystery, it fits together nicely, with all the important players given plenty of depth, back story, and motive. Like Kept, it’s a mixture of narrative, diary entries, and letters; it also shares Kept’s oppressive sense of impending doom, pervasive but not overdone.