Book Review of “Nory Ryan’s Song” by Patricia Reilly Giff

This poignant tale is told through the eyes of Nory, a young Irish girl in 1845 who has a love for music. Nory and her family cannot foresee that their life in a cottage on land owned by the English Lord Cunningham is about to change. Lord Cunningham sees the tenants on his property as obstacles, not people. He raises taxes on their land and hopes to someday rid the land of them, raze their cottages to the ground, and use their farmland as pastureland for sheep. As if the taxes were not bad enough a blight strikes the potatoes, ruining the Irish people’s main source of food. Nory, along with the whole of Ireland, is plunged into an unimaginable crisis. Will Nory be able to pull herself and her family through the hard times ahead?  

One of the reasons so many people starved to death during the Irish potato famine is that the English lords who owned the land that most Irish people lived on took away any other source of food they had like pigs and chickens. Without potatoes or livestock, they had nothing to support themselves with. I cannot help but wonder if things would have gone differently if the land lords would have acted in a different manner towards their tenants.

Story Prompters

What other tragic events in history could have ended up differently if different choices had been made? Write a piece of historical fiction illuminating the mistakes that were made which caused the tragedy to happen.