Dublin, 1830: When his da breaks his arm, Hugh ‘Scholar’ O’Dare has to leave school to work as a chimney sweeper with his brothers. When a travelling sweep's apprentice starts going after their jobs, Scholar is tasked with scaring him off, but a shocking secret comes to light. Who will they turn to, and how will the secret change their futures?
No one does historical fiction like O'Brien, right from the start with Under the Hawthorn Tree. Ann Murtagh is keeping that tradition alive with her new book, set among the chimney sweeps of Dublin. Not cheerful, singing adult men, but young children forced to climb into the chimneys and clean them from the inside out.
Like a lot of people, I only really know about this kind of chimney sweep from The Water Babies (which I've never read, but I did read the detailed summary and background information in this version:)
(Four folders, 52 magazines, this was genuinely the first one in the first folder I tried!)
Water Babies was written specifically to draw attention to the plight of climbing boys like the hero of our story, Scholar O'Dare, though The Climbing Boys is set a little earlier, when people were only starting to realise how difficult and dangerous the work was.
I don't want to give away too much; I've nearly spilled important story elements twice already and may have actually spoiled something - if you know, you know! I will say this is clever and exciting and, like other O'Brien books, cleverly weaves real people into a fictional story to give it a wonderful grounding in reality. (I loved that Ann acknowledged that British people would have quite a different opinion on Daniel O'Connell!)
Fantastic read, highly recommended, I'll be suggesting it to everyone I can!
The Climbing Boys publishes on the 4th of September, 2023. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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