Favorite quote: “It all started long ago when the cottages on Ron Mor Skerry were newly built, five or six there must have been then, right down on the shore of the only bacon the island, and a family living in each. They were fisherfolk for the most part living on what they could get from the sea and the scanty crops they managed to raise on the thin soil of the island. Their life was hard, but not too hard for them to take an interest in one another’s affairs. So it was that nobody ever discovered for certain where young Ian McConville really found his wife.”
From the publisher: Fiona McConville is a child of the Western Isles, living on the Scottish mainland. City life doesn’t suit Fiona and at age ten she is sent back to her beloved isles to live with her grandparents. There she learns more about her mother’s strange ways with the seals and seabirds; hears stories of the selkies, mythological creatures that are half seal and half human; and wonders about her baby brother, Jamie, who disappeared long ago but whom fishermen claim to have seen. Fiona is determined to find Jamie and enlists her cousin Rory to help. When her grandparents are suddenly threatened with eviction, Fiona and Rory go into action. Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry is a magical story of the power of place and family history, interwoven with Scottish folklore. Rosalie K. Fry’s novel, which was the basis for John Sayles’s classic 1994 film The Secret of Roan Inish, is back in print for the first time in decades.
The Secret of Roan Innish holds a place on my list of favorite films and is now one of my favorite books as well!
