The Confessions of Nipper Mooney, full of vivid character portraits and written with a playwright's ear for dialogue, is a compelling story that charts an original course through the beauties and horrors of childhood.
Kavanagh taps into the island's richly atmospheric Irish-Catholic culture, using it as raw material for the creation of an evocative poetics of place. [Kavanagh]delivers a straightforward prose punctuated with exquisitely spare descriptive passages and fresh, natural dialogue. The characters are boldly drawn and believable, resonating with a raw authenticity that balances the mythological subtext underlying the story. This layering effects an intoxicating blurring of boundaries between religion and folklore, poetry and prayer, faith and truth.