a sound of chariots

Bridie McShane #1

by Mollie Hunter

A young girl growing up in Scotland after World War I tries to come to terms with her grief over her father's death and her increasing sense of the passage of time.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult, Grief, 20th Century

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Maureen Mollie Hunter McIlwraith writes under the name Mollie Hunter. Mollie Hunter is one of the most popular and influential twentieth-century Scottish writers of fiction for children and young adults. Her work, which includes fantasy, historical fiction, and realism, has been widely praised and has won many awards and honors, such as the Carnegie Medal, the Phoenix Award, a Boston Globe - Horn Book Honor Award, and the Scottish Arts Council Award.

There has also been great interest in Hunter's views about writing fiction, and she has published two collections of essays and speeches on the subject. Hunter's portrait hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and her papers and manuscripts are preserved in the Scottish National Library.

Her books have been as popular in the United States as in the United Kingdom, and most are still in print. Critic Peter Hollindale has gone so far as to assert that Hunter "is by general consent Scotland's most distinguished modern children's writer."

Reviews

[Cynthia Egbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grief. I believe that this might be the best treatise on grief that I have yet read in a work of fiction. That being said, I am not sure that I could consider this to be a YA book, it goes to depth about loss and the response to loss and it is not easy to read or sometimes grasp. But, I was highly impressed. This is very different from the other works offered by Ms. Hunter and I am appreciated both her writing and her grasp of what grief looks like in a young, artistic soul.

Passages of worth:

"Her favorite hymns were the ones that had mourning in the music for, as she sang these, she could feel begin drawn out of her a feeling of longing, a great and terrible yearning for something she could not name and which she knew she would never reach. It was a strange and painful feeling, this yearning, yet still it was more desirable than any pleasure, and sometimes it gripped her so strongly that the tears came from nowhere and ran down her face. After that the feelings would ease off."

"That first winter after her father died she was in a lot of trouble in different ways. There was nothing she could do about it either for it took time to get used to the clear, sharp way in which she saw things now. She simply had to stand and stare till she had absorbed the whole intricate wonder of anything that caught her eye - even the most ordinary rings, she found, had a shape, a color, a texture she had never realized before. Faces, to, were different, for somehow the barrier between other people and herself had vanished along with the skin that had been peeled from her eyes in the lane after the funeral, and now she was back in close and direct contact with people she saw them with the same clarity of vision that applied to everything else."

"The sadness poured out of her in the song, a sadness that somehow not only for herself now, but for them all. She was watching the women's faces as she sang and seeing on each one of the them shadow of the cripple that stood behind it. And she was aware too, as she sang, of the darkness outside the hall, aware of it not as the ordinary dark of night but as a great and terrible something surrounding them all; and her mind cried out through the song to the women that here inside the hall they were safe together in a little oasis of light in the big darkness. They were all inside it, linked together and pushing back against the great dark outside, and a wave of compassion was carrying her forward into them, into the chain of women linked together to hold off the great world of darkness pressing in all round them. All the familiar identities she knew for them were gone, swallowed up in an overwhelming awareness of their common weakness, their common plight. And from this awareness and from her compassion there was flowering such a vast, incommunicable love for them all that the song was finally choked in tears and faltered to a stop."

"He had a way of stopping at some line in a poem and repeating it to himself softly, as if he wanted to hear it again with a different, inner ear that would discover more meanings in the words, more tones in their sound than a first hearing could possible give."

"Poetry, true poetry is an art that will bear a great deal of thinking before one decides to make a vocation of it. Consider all those men of letters, my child, who had little of what we understand as formal schooling. Take heart from their example and remember that, as with experience, so with knowledge; it is not the manner in which you acquire it that matters, but the use to which you put it."

"You got the gift of gab from your father, you can be sure of that. And you have the same fire in you - the same great love of life that he had. But don't be proud of any gifts you have, dearie. Be grateful for them, remembering they are a trust from God that you must render back some day."

[Featherheart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a powerful book. Since there isn't any synopsis, I will type the first paragraph of the inside cover, which sums it up nicely:
Bridie Mcshane was the most boisterous of this family of five children who grew up in a small village in Scotland after World War I. Yet she was also the most sensitive of them, and she had been her father's favorite child. For a long time after she was told of his death, she was devastated by grief, and she was haunted also by a sense of Time passing towards the inexorable moment of her own eventual death.
It's a really good book, very powerfully written. I highly reccomend it.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book spoke to me powerfully when I read it as a child, and is one of the few books I have read multiple times.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grieving her father's death from first World War wounds, young Bridie McShane, conscious of "Time's wing'd chariots" became unusually aware of the world and people around here, on her way to becoming a poet.
This coming of age novel chronicles the development of a young, gifted writer. Slow to start and set in an unfamiliar post WWI Scottish village, in a housing project full of injured veterans, this gets better as the reader becomes more conscious of the careful crafting of the words and the detailed descriptions of both the natural world and the people of the family and the village, through Bridie's eyes. This book received the Phoenix Award.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a lull in the middle, the action picks up in the second half, though it ends in a very philosophical mood. Hunter is an exquisite writer.

[Gena Lott · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice story about a girl coming to grips with the death of her father during World War I.

[Sandra Allemeersch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually wanne give it a 3,5 stars.

It was really a 'sweet' book to read. Beautiful use of language and O-my-god the 'scottish' parts <3
I would have liked the book to be longer/thicker. I wanted to know what happend after that in her life.
I liked the way of thinking of the main character. A revolutionist :)
For me it was a good book to read on vacation.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Power of poetry to understand the human heart in pain.