Oonagh

by Mary Tilberg

In 1831, eighteen-year-old Oonagh Corcoran emigrates with her sister from southern Ireland to Upper Canada. In the deep folds of cool, green forest off the vast inland sea of Lake Ontario, she believes she has found paradise — only to discover that the New World harbours its own horrible injustices when she meets a fugitive slave from Virginia named Chauncey Taylor. Love grows between them as Chauncey slowly reveals his terrible past to Oonagh, reliving the pain and tragedy he and his family suffered as slaves. The two find that even in their small, accepting community, there are certain lines that can never be crossed. Based on historical research, Oonagh is both a powerful love story and a gripping tale that reaches deep into the secret heart of our nation’s past.

Genres: Canada, Historical Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2009

Reviews

[Charleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds"
I drove myself crazy trying to pinpoint what town Oonagh was living in, because Cobourg and Peterborough are familiar landmarks to me. In the end, it doesn't matter.
You know from the prologue that the story ends in tragedy, and in the last third of the book the plot hurdles sickeningly along with a sense of inevitability. Some have critiqued Oonagh for being overly oblivious to the racism of her community, but hindsight is 20/20. Oonagh, even coming from a tiny homogenous community in Ireland, knows injustice. She knows that they need to be careful about letting people know about their love. If she gets carried away and doesn't handle others carefully enough, it needs to be remembered that she's young (what, 18?) and in love.
Chauncey is wonderful and I'm half in love with him myself. He handles Oonagh's overexcitement at finally finding someone to share her thoughts on religion with so gracefully, with such insight to her bitterness and anger. But then he's not invulnerable and perfect himself. When he gets scared that he's overstepped with Oonagh and that she'll make trouble for him and he falls into his old slavery mindset my heart just about broke. It's too bad that he couldn't have shown a bit of foresight and suggested that they move to York (Toronto) before marriage, so then maybe tragedy could have been averted. But I guess happy endings aren't historically accurate. Boorish men not dealing well when their sense of entitlement is challenged is sadly still too relevant.
"O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks upon tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark"

[Danielle Vuong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in 3 days. It was the story of an Irish Woman who came to Ontario, Canada in the 1800s and fell in love with a Black man who escaped slavery in the United States. The characters were super engaging and so was their story. I feel like I now know what it was like to live in Ireland in the 1800s, come over on a boat (do NOT recommend!), and live in Ontario in that century as well.

[Marni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love story set in Upper Canada in the 1830's involving an Irish woman and a black man.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ok read about slavery, immigration and love. A twist at the end but the last chapter was more like a history lesson.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a good read, though this book definitely feels like it was written in another time socially, it is clearly well meaning but doesn’t always age well.

[Jena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that's hard to review because you want readers to experience the book--called an "act of narrative resurrection" by another reviewer--without knowing too much in advance.

The origin of this book is as fascinating as the book itself: Tilberg was reading Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, and a tiny bit of paragraph kindled an idea. Moodie mentioned the shivaree of a black man (a barber, an escaped slave from America) and his white wife, a pretty Irish girl he'd "persuaded to marry him." Moodie said nothing else about this couple in the book, just a few sentences on a page, but they rooted in Tilberg's imagination; she had to know more.

Tilberg sought out the remnants of the Underground Railroad. She scoured newspapers for mentions of this strange couple. From a scrap--a barber's ad--and her wider research of their likely histories, Tilberg has created a love story spliced from Chauncey's escape and survival and Oonagh's emigration from Ireland just before the cholera epidemic in the early 1830's.

My only two (tiny) complaints:

1. Oonagh's apparent selective obliviousness to the extent of racial tensions in the town defied belief at times.
2. The last chapter felt more like a history lesson and less like part of the narrative that had been flowing so smoothly before. I would have liked one more chapter before the last one to act as a bridge to the future, more mature Oonagh's mindset; I wasn't ready to be there yet when I arrived at the 30-year-jump.

[Jossy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found out about this book through Bitch magazine. The reason that I wanted to read it was because the main characters last name is "Corcoran" and immigrated from Ireland to Ontario. My mother is a Corcoran from Ontario. So I felt like it was a story of my family. They also came to Canada at around the same time. We have a homestead there.

I wanted there to be more information about Canada and Ireland and less about the slave trade in the States. There are a lot of books based on those themes. There also was almost no talk about First Nations here in Canada.

I still loved it! Especially the name, "Oonagh",. Beautiful.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

great tale of people escaping oppression and fleeing to upper canada and finding each other before the times were ready for their union

[Elizabeth Larson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished reading yesterday. Amazing book with an ending I did not expect. We'll written. About a young Irish Girl emigrating to Canada in 1819 and lived in our area.