"Fiesty sisters face life with wit, wisdom and love"

Occasionally life will hand us a situation and we don't know if we are strong enough to handle.

This is the case for Peggy Donaghue when she learns that her young son is autistic. So she puts her medical career on hold while she struggles to understand the condition that has her son locked in a world of his own. When she receives an offer to spend a year in Ireland with a distant relative, she grabs the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with her son and learn about her family's past in return.

Emilie Richards returns to the story of the Donaghue sisters in her novel, "The Parting Glass," a sequel to her bestselling book, "Whiskey Island," which began the chronicles of the lives of the Donaghue clan, the family who has been apart of Cleveland's large Irish community since days of the first immigrant's arrival.

Richards picks up her story of the feisty Donaghue sisters, focusing on little sister Peggy's story. Her decision to move to Ireland to live with elderly distant cousin Irene Tierney proves to be a move that will affect not only her life, but the lives of her entire family. As Peggy helps Irene unravel the mystery of their connected lineage, they discover family secrets that will soon come clearly important to the American side of the family. Experiencing love in the form of handsome but tragic Dr. Finn O'Malley will prove to be an added adventure that Peg hadn't planned on.

Back in the States, Megan, the eldest sister, has married her true love, Niccolo Andreani, an ex-priest who works with the trouble youth of their close-knit neighborhood. However, on the night of their wedding, a tornado strikes, all but leveling the historic Whiskey Island saloon, revealing a mysterious marking that will change the lives of everyone who comes into view of it. As they work to restore the saloon, Megan and Nick found out that married life is not exactly all wine and roses. As the couple work through communication problems early on, each wonders if they have made a mistake abandoning their former lives.

Only the middle sister, Casey, is living in relative harmony, having married her high school sweetheart, Jon Kovats and now is expecting their first child. But if one Donaghue ain't happy, none of them are happy, and the two older sister travel to Ireland to try to sort out their myriad of problems together, family style.

Intermixed with the Donaghue sisters' story is the story of Irene's family during the early days of Prohibition, and how their family became intertwined with the Donaghues in the beginning. The love story of Glenn Donaghue and Clare McNulty is heartbreaking and poignant.

Emilie Richards wraps up her Whiskey Island saga successfully, tying up loose ends and treating her fans to bits of Irish humor, angst, and whimsy in her writing. She ties her story together with glimpses into the past via letters written between the parish priest and his Irish sister. This gives wonderful background information, as well as bringing the story together for a magnificent and satisfying conclusion.

Reviewed by Sharon Galligar Chance
Posted July 31, 2003

Summary

The Donaghue sisters have shared all the joys and struggles of a complicated past, and at the center of it all has been the Whiskey Island Saloon, a historic Irish-American pub overlooking Lake Erie that has been in their family for five generations. Megan, who runs the saloon, is planning a wedding. Casey is busy settling into the life she shares with her new husband. And Peggy has put her medical degree on hold after discovering her young son, Kieran, is autistic.

When the sisters receive a letter from a relative they have never met, Peggy believes it is the answer to her worries. Irene Tierney is an elderly woman living alone in a remote cottage in the Irish village of Shanmullin. Irene needs the Donaghue sisters' help to learn the truth about her father's death in Cleveland more than seventy-five years ago, and Peggy needs the opportunity the older woman offers. Peggy agrees to go to Ireland to care for Irene in return for a place to live and the chance to spend time working with her son.

After Megan's tumultuous wedding, Peggy and Kieran travel to Shanmullin, where she and Irene form an instant bond. Not everyone, however, is happy to have a stranger in the village. Dr. Finn O'Malley, Irene's physician and a widower with sorrows of his own, resents Peggy's intrusion into Irene's life. But neither Finn nor Peggy can resist their undeniable attraction, though it seems destined to end in heartache.

In Cleveland, Megan has heartaches, too. As her marriage falters, she allows her search for answers to Irene's past to become all-consuming. Needing her own answers, Megan flies to Shanmullin, and Casey soon joins her sisters for a reunion. As a stunning tale of secrets and self-sacrifice, greed and hidden passions unfolds, the lives of each sister will be changed forever.