Rating: 
Summary: excellent
Review: This book was excellent. A great mixture of historical fiction, romance, and insight. I couldn't help but underline passages to recite to my friends.
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Summary: PROVOKES STRONG FEELINGS
Review: After finishing this book and lending it to a friend with my highest recommendation, I kept returning to my book corner, longing to pick it up and continue the story, and wishing that it hadn't ended. This book is one of my very favorites from the past few years, and one of the very few that I plan to reread. I was surprised to find some of your reviewers hated the book. For that reason I am going to recommend it to my book club, because a more interesting discussion usually takes place when there is disagreement over the merits of a selection.
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Summary: A lonely woman travel writer finds uncomfortable parallels.
Review: Kathleen DeBurca is on a quest, or rather on simultaneous quests. One is to come to terms with her lonely life, the other is to solve the mystery surrounding the divorce of Lord Talbot from his adulteress wife during the latter 1800's.The setting is Ireland and its tumultuous history during and post the famine years. Kathleen leads the willing reader to a number of possible scenarios concerning the infamous divorce. Was his Lordships's wife innocent, a schemer, wronged and lonely, or cunning? Kathleen meets a cast of charming characters in the village to which she travels and holes up as she tries to unfathom the answers to her historical mystery. Documents are discovered by the local librarian (another charming addition to the multiple-layered tale) in the village's library that allows Kathleen to change her estimation of Lady Talbot; then still more is discovered and the possible scenarios change again! The story is peeled away layer upon layer and it's easy for the reader to wish Kathleen would "get on with it" when it comes to her own personal dilemmas, so that the Talbot plot can be once again re-entered and solved. But it is because of the episodic "finds" in the local town that the tale remains intriguing to the end. A fine read!
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Summary: Archie Bunker goes to Ireland
Review: I've often wondered why people found a fat, brainless, rude, emotionally abusive and bigoted man named Archie Bunker so amusing. I could never watch 'All in the Family' for more than 2 minutes. But millions did and it shouldn't surprise me that there are so many glorious recommendations for this book. The main character is so self-absorbed in her pathetic, empty and immoral life. I tried reading this book for my book club but had to stop about half way through. This book is torture and a complete waste of time. Maybe it's that Archie Bunker syndrome that there are so many people out there who really enjoy the idea that someone else's life is as bad if not worse than theirs.
Rating: 
Summary: For 500 pages, I expected a little more....
Review: I got halfway through this book and was tempted to stop reading, but since I had already invested 250 pages I thought I would finish it. I was a little put off by the lack of quotation marks that make it hard to determine who was speaking at times. Kathleen was such an amoral character that it was hard to relate to her. And after all the expenditure about the Talbot case, I expected a little better resolution to that story. Not recommended.
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Summary: Cross-pollination of a journalist's essay and a memoir
Review: Once upon a time, there was a middle-aged, unmarried Irish lady, who spent most of her life in London, as a journalist, working for a traveling magazine. Having severed her relationship with the Mother Country, her relatives, she drifts through life seeking happiness, and not being terribly successful in that quest. On the spur of the moment, she decides to make a substantial change in her life, and make some use of her writing abilities, and fictionalize the old story of love between an Irish pauper and an English landlady in the dark times of the famine. That story wasn't quite of the Cinderella quality, because the Cinderella himself was a man, to be sure, and second, because there wasn't really much to tell, no fairytale to expand on, and there was no happy end for both lovers. As might be expected, although not hoped for, the fictionalized romance was essentially a journalist's essay, suffering from wordiness, and skimming only the surface, despite the effort put into the retelling. I am sure that Nuala O'Faolain is a talented person, however, as this book clearly indicates, her talents lie quite elsewhere, not in mainstream fiction. She has a keen observational sense, that much is evident, however, with a scope of work as wide as this one, she somehow cannot escape the occupational hazard, and the book, or at least the relatively small part dealing with the romance is not much more than an essay, which delivers about as much essence as a long magazine article would. Famine - how much there was to tell, how much to discover, or rediscover, rather - from a new perspective of the XXI century, from the point of view of a lady of Irish heritage, who knows the ins and outs, the charms and peculiarities of the country. Unfortunately, the topic is just barely touched, as if common decency dictated to at least put a threadbare skeleton of a setup. There is not much to learn from this book in this respect. Instead, the fictionalized story of the Talbot divorce case is a pure romance of the flesh, so to speak. The author is clearly interested in the carnal dimension, her writing reflects that tendency, and when all is said and done, the whole literary adventure seems to be quite bland. So many words, and so little essence. Then there is the second dimension of the book, the memoir. In scattered bits and pieces, the narrator tells us the story of her life, what are the current aches and pains, with the events of the past unearthed if only to provide an explanation for the current, miserable state of affairs. The lady repeatedly tries to answer some basic set of questions, circling around and about, and finishing as confused as she started. Perhaps there is no simple answer to questions like this, so perhaps she shouldn't be blamed for not having offered us a reasonable, robust and sound explanation. Why is she alone, why there was only one person she was able to attach herself to emotionally, and in fact that man, her colleague, has never been her lover, while at the same time she never refused anyone else, who bothered to ask, or even slightly hint at? Why did she hurt everyone who loved her, where did this force come from a force that transformed her life into a series of carnal adventures, some uplifting, some grim, and some utterly forgettable, why? She does not know. I don't know either. This book is a memoir of a confused lady, that's what it is, and it's intriguing to read, no doubt, but somehow the confused state of the writer seems to be contagious. So much has been written, and as a reader, I am deeply confused. I regret that I haven't been able to extract more from this book, perhaps I am too young, and my personality hasn't evolved enough for me to be able to understand the musings and anxieties apparent in "My Dream of You". On the other hand, I have an impression that the author's attempts have turned out to be too shallow to be memorable, her quest toward discovery of what it means to be Irish is never definitive, full of slogans and stereotypes, nothing to be fond of. If you would like to read a real work on that topic, you might try Edna O'Brien or Alice Taylor, and last but not least, the great son of the Emerald Island - James Joyce.
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Summary: More of a disappointment than a dream...
Review: After reading some of the overblown reviews, which reference feminism, self-discovery, and the crossover between literature and love, I was expecting something along the lines of A.S. Byatt's "Possession." Instead, this book was the depressing tale of a woman who is unable to say no to dreary and squalid sex (at one point her elderly lover takes out his dentures to take her to bliss) and the historic/tragic love affair she is researching is even less interesting. The protagonist has the inner life of a blank page and the dead woman she identifies with is equally tepid. Her flashbacks to a difficult childhood are supposed to illuminate her distance from the world and those inhabiting it. Instead, they seem to be an oversimplified and awkward technique that takes the reader back to a past where our heroine is as featureless and unexplained as she is in the present. I hate to be harsh, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.
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Summary: Introspective commentary on the depth of human spirit
Review: Upon first selecting My Dream of You, I was cautious and unsure about my enjoyment of the work I had selected. As the first pages whisked under my eyes, however, my fears evaporated like mist on a sunny spring day. O'Faolain's ideas are introspective, contemplative, profound, and unendingly moving. The chapters of the book flow as if sewn by a seamstress of unparalleled skill and demeanor. We face many decisions in life. Important among those are purchasing decisions: how are we to spend the income for which we work so hard? Purchasing My Dream of You constitutes one of the wisest decisions a person can buy. Get this book. You won't regret this book.
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Summary: A good growing-into-yourself book
Review: This book starts slow. In fact, it is kind of slow all the way through. However, this fits the novel. Kathleen is a travel writer who has spent her life traveling and hiding from her past. When her best friend Jimmy dies suddenly, Kathleen is left without bearings--no one for her really to turn to in times of trouble. However, she remembers a 150-year old divorce case she read many years ago, and decides to investigate it. Throughout the novel, Kathleen comes to many conclusions about her past, her family and her relationships with men. She comes to these conclusions through her investigation of the Talbot case. I didn't think that I would be able to complete this novel. However, about 1/3 of the way through, I became engrossed in the various stories in the novel, that I couldn't put it down. I would highly recommend this novel, but make sure you give the beginning enough time to resonate within yourself.
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Summary: Poorly Recycled from Memoir
Review: I read Ms. O'Faolin's memoir "Are You Somebody?" before picking up "My Dream of You, only to find it was the same grim story recycled and re-packaged as a novel.
The story follows a travel writer - who is uninspired by travel -through her various failed relationships, including those she sabatoged herself, to the stage where she is gracelessly aging and grasping for all that life has not handed her on a platter. It seems the best thing about this character is her wardrobe, since for some reason we are given more insight to what brand names hang in her closet than who she might actually be. By the middle of the book you don't care, are just wishing that an editor had been involved in the publishing of this book.
I wonder who Ms. O'Faolin WAS dreaming of - it's never really specified, I only know I was dreaming that this irredeemable character would, in the next chapter, or the next, stop whinging, pick herself up out of her morass of self-absorbtion, and give us all a break.
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