The Irish know the blight that destroyed Ireland's 1845-1847 potato crop caused a million estate tenants and small landowners to die of starvation and disease, or to flee their homeland in the Irish Diaspora. The Ballyburren Rapes involves three Irish tenant families' relationships with their cruel landlord, their mismatched clergymen, and the estate agent who mercilessly rules their lives. Ballyburren suffers three rapes. Two violate young tenant virgins, the third the land itself when the potato crop fails for the third year. Tiny patches provide tenants their only crop, potatoes. When blight strikes, they can't pay their cabin rent and eat, too. Their avaricious landlord threatens evictions. When protagonist, Mikey Crowley, is falsely accused of murder, he flees to Dublin and joins revolutionary Young Ireland's members plotting to overthrow British rule. Rushing home later to save his starving family, Mikey confronts his Ballyburren oppressors. Carnage, murder, starvation, eviction, and emigration follow in this exciting and stirring tale of nineteenth-century Ireland.
评价“The Ballyburren Rapes”