Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical and Devastating
Review: An exploration of the undercurrents of human existance, The Nature of Air and Water tells a seductive and sensory tale that weaves around Ireland, the pull of the sea, and the pull of myth. Myth is, after all, a metaphor for truths in life, and the main character in this novel is nearly consumed by the search for truth of her origins. In her description of the Tinker life, McBride's prose is both lyrical and devastating - envoking a vision of Ireland that is both gritty and enchanting.
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Summary: A lyrical labor of love, loss and beginning...
Review: As dense with fable and mystery as the Irish coast, this is the work of a poet whose images are cast in the clothes of her luminous prose. The recurring theme throughout is of love and death, the bonds of attachment and the anguish of loss. This tale is so seductive as to draw the reader ever closer to the line between mythology and truth, where life is divided between reality and the insistent song of the sea. "It seemed to be the nature of water and air, to be random, heartless". Not so, this novel.Young Clodagh Sheehy lives in thrall of her distant mother, Agatha, who comes from the world of itinerant tinkers, and listens carefully to the call of this wild land where they live. Agatha's actions are shrouded with secrecy and full of sexual innuendo, and she drifts just beyond her daughter's knowing, unwilling to be trapped by the child's need and loneliness. Clodagh's fragile twin sister, Mare, has died and the girl wills Mare to remain, if only as her other half, the opposite coin of her identity. She plays the piano one-handed, leaving the other part, the other hand, for Mare, and sometimes stares into the cloudy mirror, hoping for a glimpse of her other self. Their father, Frank Sheehy, dies before the twin's birth, and Clodagh, in anguished desperation, clings to the only person remaining, her mother. But like the mythological selkie, half-seal, half-woman, Agatha returns to the depths of the sea, now lost as well. Cut adrift and friendless, but for a loving housekeeper, Clodagh begins a journey toward self-discovery, often tangled between the worlds of reality and superstition. In reaching out to identify the face of her mother, Clodagh discovers the truth of herself. Her adolescence is often painful and life changing, her passion for music frequently the only solace. Clodagh's dead father Frank, her possibly-alive real father, a tinker, and her early foray into sexuality are without satisfaction until she breaks free and claims herself. McBride's novel is flooded with page after page of images. The vast canvas of such rugged, gorgeous geography serves as the background for dreams and emotions as tumultuous and changeable as the storm-tossed waves that beat along the coast. This author has accomplished more than storytelling, she has offered a glimpse of the true nature of Ireland, the very nature of water and air. Luan Gaines
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing Irish story that will keep you wanting more.
Review: From the start of this book it had me wanting more. The author writes with a very poetic type of writing and makes the book move at a quick and fast pace. The story starts out by telling how Agatha and her husband met and how she has come to live in the house that she does and about her twins Clodagh and Mare. As the story goes on we learn that Agatha hates the life that she living and wants to go back to her life as a tinker and the freedom that she had. Clodagh tell the story in a way that makes you feel like you are there. From her friendship with Mrs O'Dare and Letty and her undying love for her sister Mare. When she finds out some haunting things in her life it makes her question things that she has never had to wonder about. As the story goes along you see Clodagh grow up and go through school and life and how she wants to know so much more about her mother and father. When she finds that she is wanting to know about a tinker man named Angus she decides to defy everything and go traveling with him and falls in love with him. When she finds out some very haunting things during her trip with Angus it makes her understand things much better in her own life and puts some peace into her life, but not that much for she has tougher roads that lay ahead of her. This story was amazing and had me wanting to read so much more. I hope this wonderful author puts out some more amazing books.
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Summary: The Nature of Relationships
Review: I was intrigued by this book, which is one of the reasons I bought it. It's a well written story about one woman's struggle to understand herself, her mother and life. From the very opening of the book, when Clodagh says "My mother was never easy in the world of houses. She was a tinker, a traveler girl who had married a wealthy man. Her name was Agatha Sheehy...There are silences all around my mother's story.", you get an insight into Clodagh's personality too. While she is describing her mother's flighty ways, you get the feeling that Clodagh wants to have her mother be more attentive. At one point, Agatha tells Clodagh "you want to be in my skin with me" and you understand how close Clodagh really wants to be with her mother. A little further into the novel, you are with Clodagh as her mother commits suicide. From then on, the story is less about Agatha Sheehy and more about Clodagh Sheehy. From the trials of being a teenager going into puberty and learning about herself as a woman, to finding a man she is irrestitably attracted to, this book covers all aspects of relationships. Near the end, it took an unexpected turn that was not at all foreshadowed earlier in the book, so it was a good surprise. I was stunned, and then found myself hoping that it would change (and it did). It kept me on the edge of my chair until I had finished reading it. This story is surely one that will last and will have you thinking and re-thinking about your relationships. Regina McBride has written a haunting novel. This is her first novel, and I'd have to say it is probably one of the better written ones I've read.
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Summary: This book waxes lyrical verses!
Review: It is a beautifully written book with lyrical tones ~~ almost as if it was written to a tune of a piano. Some places are soft and gentle then it comes crashing down with the heavy tomes of truth and finishes with a clash of joy. It's not your typical reading. Clodagh is a young woman who have spent the years of her life looking for something that was missing from her life. Her twin, Mare, died when she was a child. Agatha, her mother, was distant and aloof with Clodagh and Clodagh never felt that her mother loved her. So when Agatha died, Clodagh found her solace in music ~~ playing the piano. Only that didn't fulfill her for long and she falls in love with a man who somehow holds the clue to her mother's past. Clodagh is a complex character ~~ you can't help but feel her anguish when she searches for what she is looking for. You can't help but admire her tenacity to hold onto life even at its darkest moments. She is a strong and yet weak character traveling between two worlds ~~ one of life and one of death. This is an interesting book ~~ but don't expect it to be a light and fluffy read like my usual reads have been. It's full of dark underlying tones that makes you either uncomfortable or anxious to explore it. It was hard for me to keep reading on some pages because it was so dark ~~ depressing almost. But I can guarantee that you will want to finish this book and find out what has happened to Clodagh. She is a character that you will not soon forget. 4-29-02
Rating:
Summary: Haunting, Lyrical, Poetic
Review: One of those wonderful novels which falls somewhere between stark realism and edgy fantasy. It's told in the voice of Clodagh, a young Irish girl whose strange, wild-spirited tinker mother may or may not have been of the seal folk. The wealthy relatives of Clodagh's deceased father don't know what to do with the odd Agatha and her two daughters, and ship them off to a decaying family house in the east. Clodagh's twin sister, never strong, dies young, though her spirit seems to live on in the demi-twilight shadow-world of Clodagh's relationship with her mother, their rough but loving housekeeper, her teachers, the development of her remarkable musical gifts, her fascination with the travelling tinker folk, her seeking after something more, something better... Eerieness and otherness are never quite distant, never fully embodied, always hovering, never alighting---something of a metaphor for the way in which Clodagh engages life, I suppose. But when she does embrace the living, she embraces with a strong will and without looking back... Really a lovely book. Unafraid of looking at the grit of modern Irish life, unashamed of the half-imagined touch of magic and myth. I enjoyed it very much.
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Summary: A Novel of Myth, Folklore, and Symbolism
Review: Regina McBride has created a lyrical tale that explores the intimate relationship between inner and outer landscapes. The novel is set in Ireland and the descriptions of the land, climate, and surroundings are intense and vivid. Through the landscape, the reader observes how Clodaugh survives and grows to know herself and family of origin on many complex levels. Through the multidimensional characters, the reader can feel the angst growing throughout the novel. The novel centres on Clodaugh Sheehy, an orphaned child with little sense of her past and future. The Nature of Water and Air, is Clodaugh's journey to discover herself and a family past that she desperately needs to reconcile. Clodagh sets out on a path where there is no looking back. As a reader, you will keep wishing things could have been different for her, but you will want the book to be exactly the same! The novel is rich in culture, myth, symbolism, and Irish folklore. The writing is both beautiful and intense; one will get lost in both the words and story. An amazing story by an amazing writer. I highly recommend this novel; it will surely evoke many emotions and great discussion. I look forward to future work by Regina McBride.
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Summary: First book to cement a place on the 2002 best-of list.
Review: Regina McBride, The Nature of Water and Air (Simon and Schuster, 2001) Wow. Okay, now that my first impressions are out of the way, this is one hell of a ride. All the more so because most books that have that effect on me are your typical big budget thrillers that, were they to go to the big screen, would be directed by John McTiernan or someone along those lines who uses a lot of pyrotechnics. The Nature of Water and Air is anything but; stuff doesn't blow up here at all. In fact, it tends to do quite the opposite; characters implode on a fairly regular basis, but they do so within the context of a pervasive atmosphere that this is the way things are supposed to be. It's hard to explain why something that's so low-key can have such an effect, but I'll give it a go. Everything that makes this book work is atmosphere-- big old houses that are falling apart, characters for whom clinical depression means things are looking up, Catholic schools harboring reclusive nuns, it all adds up to an unshakable feeling that not only is something bad bound to happen, but that everything that's bound to happen is bad. It's the revival of classic tragedy--bad things happen not because of the flaws in the characters (and there are certainly character flaws aplenty), but because the gods have deemed that, for these folks, the dice came up snake eyes again and again, no matter how many chances they got. And yet still, when bad things happen to these people (be they good or not so good), every once in a while the way in which the bad things happen, or the scope of the bad things that do happen, is carried off so brilliantly that it might as well be the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza being blown to bits in Die Hard. Enchanting. The story centers around Clodagh Sheehy and her mother, Agatha. Clodagh's father has been dead for most of her life, and she has no memory of him. She has a twin sister, Margaret Mary, who's too frail to do much other than play the piano once in a while. To top it all off, she's convinced that her mother is a selkie, a seal taken human form who is destined to return to the sea at some point. Agatha married into the Sheehy family, and is not beloved of the rest of her husband's family, so they send her to the other side of Ireland to live in a decrepit mansion the family still owns over there. Mrs. O'Dare, one of the housekeepers, comes along for the ride, and it is there our story opens. Most of the action goes forward through the reader finding out more and more about Clodagh's family (the unraveling of her mother's mysterious origins, the relationships between Agatha's husband and his sisters, etc.), but there is also Clodagh's growing up; the book takes place over the span ow twenty years. from Clodagh's girlhood until just after her twenty-first birthday. It is an uncompromisingly dark novel, one for which the word "bleak" is too light and airy. And yet it never fails to be beautiful. ****
Rating:
Summary: A compelling read!
Review: Spanning the twenty years from 1960 to 1981, we enter the timeless magic of Ireland, a story that could take place now or in almost another century. Clodaugh Sheehy straddles two worlds, that of the genteel and that of the tinker (people sometimes referred to as Ireland's gypsies). Even before Clodaugh's birth, events are set in motion that will determine her own destiny. Once Frank Sheehy, the frail- hearted father dies, Clodaugh's aunts can no longer abide his wife, the wild tinker woman, Agatha, and they banish her from the West of Ireland to their empy house on the eastern coast, where she gives birth to twin daughters, the feisty precocious Clodaugh, and a sickly sister, Mary, called Mare. Agatha likes pretty dresses and trinkets, but she also likes to roam near the sea and out in the fields, seeking the campfires and caravans of the tinkers she lived with as a girl until she met Frank Sheehy. Clodaugh and Mare are mostly left to their own devices except for the kindly care of a house servant, Mrs. O'Dare. At age five, Mare dies, and the distraught and lonely Clodaugh abandons for a time the piano they played together, feels Mare inside herself at times, and wants to cleave even more strongly to her mother. However, when Agatha walks into the sea for the last time, Clodaugh is now truly alone and has to grow up. She gives up her belief in ghosts and selkies, tries to forget Agatha and Mare, and attends the convent school, where she proves herself to be an accomplished musician on the piano. She goes on to win a prestigious award at college and her destiny seems secure and certain until the call of the tinker life and in particular, the chance meeting with a copper-haired man named Angus threatens to undermine everything. Told in a straightforward, yet heartbreaking manner, part mythic, almost every line stirs with poetry, undoubtedly inspired by the Yeats which Angus quotes to Clodaugh, but probably also by the author's own poetic background, as well as the land itself, where sea and sky meet and one can almost imagine a woman who is half seal and half woman swimming on the tides. Amazingly, the story, saturated as it is with sentimentality, still manages to strike just the right tone and keep the reader's interest throughout.
Rating:
Summary: Must read!
Review: Sure, it's melancholy. But it's so beautifully written and there are so many layers to these characters. This is a story that stays with you long after finishing. I'll definitely be picking up McBride's second novel.
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