Song of the Silent Harp

B.J. Hoff

This novel takes place in Ireland and America during the second year of the Great Potato Famine. It follows a widow in Ireland and her sons, a rebel Irishman, an Englishman sent by his English lord to check out his holdings in Ireland, and an Irish policeman in New York City. This book paints vivid pictures of the famine, the treatment Irish tenants received at the hands of their English landowners, the struggles and feelings between the Irish and the English, and life aboard an immigrant ship crossing to America.

Nora Kavanagh's young daughter has just died of the fever. Deaths are commonplace in her small Irish village due to both the fever and the famine. Her husband had died six months earlier. She has barely eked out a living doing tailoring work for others, and now even that has dwindled away.

Morgan Fitzgerald is a huge Irishman who loves his country and Nora. They had been sweethearts as teens, but he then took off as a minstrel. He has since become an outlaw, robbing from the English to help the Irish.

Evan Whittaker was a valet for the English lord who owned the village where Nora lived. His boss sent him to Ireland to help the overseer evict the Irish families who were in arrears in their rent.

Michael Burk is the Irish policeman in New York City. He was a friend of Nora and Morgan's when they were children. After receiving a letter from Morgan about the famine and the conditions in Ireland, he writes to Nora and asks her to come to America and marry him.

B.J. Hoff writes a wonderful novel. Many a time I would cry or react to the conditions she described. Yet as vivid as the hardships and sufferings were, she never made them overwhelming to make the novel depressing. She kept the tone even, citing the atrocities but not overdwelling on them.

The best part about this book is the way God and Jesus Christ are woven into these people's every day lives. This is a religious novel. Yet it is not written to use God to beat over the reader's head with a stick. Instead the heroes in this book live by God's tenants and faith, yet still deal with the world around. Their faith in Christ is their center focus, but not the center focus of the book. It is the strength of the book, instead.

Read this book! It is a picture of how mankind keeps finding ways to abuse each other. Mankind also finds ways to overcome that abuse, which is also an important element of this novel. There are two more books in the series. I hope to borrow the next one tomorrow on tape to listen to in the car. I want to know what happens next to these people.