The Law of Dreams

May 22, 2006
Screenwriter Behrens follows his 1987 story collection, Night Driving
, with an ambitious epic that follows a hapless wee lad from the rotten potato fields of 1847 Ireland to a New England horse ranch. Fergus O'Brien, the teenage son of a tenant farmer, is sent to a workhouse after his parents are murdered. He quickly escapes, joins a band of brigands and, after raiding his former landlord's farm, drifts to Dublin and then to Liverpool, where he is primed to work as a "pearl boy" (read: male prostitute). He hits the road again, this time settling in Wales, where he works on a rail line and meets Red Molly, a married woman who becomes his lover and traveling companion to America, where he plans to become a horse trader. The book veers dangerously close to melodrama on more than a few occasions, and Fergus, for all the contretemps encountered and indignities suffered, remains thin and unconvincing as a narrator. But readers may be able to overlook Behrens's authorial missteps and enjoy the sprawling, cinematically rendered immigrant story.

June 1, 2006
In this novel, which is based on his own family history, screenplay and short story writer Behrens ("Night Driving") has captured the harshness of the Irish experience in the late 1840s, when blight ruined the potato crops and thousands of people were ejected from the land on which they lived and worked -land owned by distant British aristocracy and managed by local lease-holding farmers. The novel follows the struggles of Fergus O -Brien, who suffered under this ruthless, feudal-like system and was ravaged by the starvation and disease that descended upon the Irish people. A survivor, Fergus joins up with a band of young outlaws, seeks refuge in a Liverpool brothel, and seesaws through myriad emotions. In time, armed with growing self-awareness, he and a female companion decide to start anew in America. The narrative offers terse, emphatic statements that strike at the essence of a character -s feelings. Sometimes this approach lends universality to a character or situation; Behrens -s depiction of Fergus -s perspective, for example, reflects the mysteries and difficulties flowing between men and women as they try to form relationships. Recommended for larger public and all academic library collections." -Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2006
Inspired by his own family history, Behrens has fashioned a paean to the strength of the human spirit that illuminates a piece of history. Fergus O'Brien is still in his teens in 1846 when blight strikes his potatoes and typhus his family, whose cabin is set aflame with his younger sisters dead and his parents lying ill inside. Famine, fever, and deprivation are his constant companions, from the workhouse to which he is sent, through his time with an outlaw band, an attack on the farm on which his father was a tenant, respite in a Liverpool bordello, and work in Wales, where he takes a fancy to his shanty-owner's "railroad wife," red-haired Molly, with whom he sets sail for the New World. The law of dreams is to keep moving, and that's what Fergus does, taking advantage of opportunities even as he is haunted by dreams and hurt by betrayal. Behrens tells this story in spare prose that distills ideas to their essence, making this absorbing historical fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)