Starred Review ALA Booklist (Mon Feb 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Starred Review Through the voices of the Irish people, Bartoletti tells the history of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s. Eyewitness accounts and memories combine with devastating facts: one million died from starvation and disease; two million emigrated; the famine could have been avoided; the legacy was a bitter resentment against the English, who owned most of Ireland. The year-by-year political history is occasionally heavy going; but, as she did in Growing Up in Coal Country (1996), a Booklist Editors' Choice, Bartoletti humanizes the big events by bringing the reader up close to the lives of ordinary people. There are heartbreaking accounts of evictions, of the Irish starving while food is exported to England, and of deaths in the coffin ships that took the desperate to North America. The text is broken up with many black-and-white drawings from newspapers of the time, and a long final essay includes information about books, primary sources, library collections, and Web sites that readers can turn to for school reports and for research into their own family histories. It's a wonder there are so few nonfiction books about this subject for young people.

Horn Book

In explaining how repeated years of blighted crops decimated Ireland's huge subsistence class, Bartoletti draws on an impressive array of sources to give faces and names to those who suffered and to those in positions of influence in Ireland and England. Added materials include a map, time line, and discussion of sources. Numerous archival prints add haunting evidence. Bib., ind.

Kirkus Reviews (Mon Feb 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Using illustrations from mid-19th-century newspapers and stories of people actually involved, Bartoletti has written a fascinating account of a terrible time. In the Great Irish Famine, one million people died from starvation and disease, and two million fled to other countries after a fungus destroyed the potato crop, a disaster in a country where six million farm laborers depended on that one crop. Bartoletti's sure storytelling instincts put the reader in the midst of the drama. Though the layout is dense and uninviting (in galley form), the stories make the narrative memorable. Bridget O'Donnel, sick and seven months pregnant, is evicted from her cabin. "Spectre-like" crowds of walking skeletons in Skibbereen on market day see shops full of food they can't afford to buy. British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel's determination to persuade the government to help is thwarted by laissez-faire economic policies and religious and ethnic prejudice. This is history "through the eyes and memories of the Irish people," and it is history that's meant to instruct. In her conclusion and extensive bibliography, Bartoletti steps back from her narrative to encourage readers to respond to the hunger, poverty, and human suffering in our own time. An illuminating discussion of the Great Irish Famine and how emigrants contributed to the growth of cities around the world. (Nonfiction. 10-14)

School Library Journal (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Gr 6-10-When most American teens talk about hunger, it's that growling sensation before meals. Famine is beyond their ken, an abstraction made only marginally concrete by TV images of the Third World. In the Irish potato famine of 1845-50, it was Europeans starving to death, and the impact on Ireland (one million dead, two million fled) and on the U.S. was staggering (those immigrants came here). The chronology of the disaster unfolds in this gruelingly poignant text that draws heavily on news reports and first-person narratives. Bartoletti's title also incorporates period pen-and-ink sketches and poetry laying bare the fragility, injustice, and stratification of Irish peasant society that could not cope with agricultural tumult. People lived on potatoes-and only potatoes-while growing profitable exports for British landlords. When the crops mysteriously failed repeatedly over the next five years, the peasants simply starved to death while the social structure of the society nearly died along with the populace. Relief efforts were brutally incompetent where they existed at all, and only the Quakers emerge as heroes of mercy. The bibliography (also narrative) provides some of the most fascinating historical reading in the book. Overall, a useful addition to collections, for both personal and research uses.-Mary R. Hofmann, Rivera Middle School, Merced, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.