Moira's Crossing

A fluid, meditative family saga, Shea's debut traces the lives of two sisters from their childhood in 1920s rural Ireland through middle-age in New England. Moira and Julia O'Leary's mother died giving birth to their sister, Ann, leaving the girls to raise the infant with little help from their hard-drinking, grieving sheep farmer father. Temperamentally, the two older sisters have little in common. Moira is hardy, confident and headstrong; she angrily abandons religion when her mother dies, and has little patience for conventional society. Julia, the caretaker of the family, is pious, delicate and proper. These differences, which Shea renders somewhat simplistically, cause lifelong friction between the siblings, first coming to a head in their teens when the ailing Ann dies as a result of Moira's willful negligence. Reeling from the loss, their father sends the girls to Boston, where they work as domestic servants until Moira marries Michael Sheehan, a fellow Irish immigrant, and the couple settle in Maine to run a lobster boat. Julia soon moves into their home and helps raise their two daughters, Kate and Helen, remaining unmarried, nursing a secret crush on Michael and writing for a local paper. Throughout her life, Moira's atheism periodically wavers in the face of Julia's unflagging, devout Catholicism. Moira's contemplations of God tend to sound facile and forced, rare moments of heavyhandedness in Shea's otherwise sinuous prose. Indeed, for all her stylistic polish, Shea's characterizations of the sisters and supporting cast is rather thinly developed. Drawn in broad strokes, the sisters and their families are plausible characters typifying the Irish immigrant experience, but they lack the idiosyncrasies and animated intelligence that would make them truly memorable. (Jan.)