"This moving memoir of a lost childhood is so compelling because the author triumphs from despair. Told in a matter-of-fact manner, rather than a scathing commentary, furnished with amazing detail from the author’s photographic memory, the reader not only shares the pain of a child ripped from a family, but receives a vivid “street level” portrait of mid 20th century rural Ireland, ruled like a theocracy by the Catholic Church.

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Here we see how children were reared in forlorn convents, where love and nurturing were replaced by corporal discipline, fear and religious indoctrination...