Josephine's Secrets

A brilliant memoir of Anne Marie Quinn who was born and raised at the beginning of another uproar between the Protestants and Catholics in Belfast, Northern Ireland to Catholic parents. An unforeseen and terrible split between her parents caused her mother Josephine to sneak off on a ship to England with an English man, taking only two of her four children with her. Anne Marie subsists through a struggle to find her way back to Ireland to find her father and abandoned brothers. It's a story that accounts for Anne Marie's survival; going to the night-watchman and pleading for coal to light the fire, wearing rags for clothes, and begging for money outside an English pub with her younger brother, among many other happenings. Anne Marie and her brother Joseph smarted poverty and the fortuitous cruelty of the British government, but she lived to tell her story with eloquence and forgiveness.