The Outside Boy

April 15, 2010
Pavees, or travelers, are a distinctive Irish sub-culture which Cummins celebrates in this uneven first novel, following her memoir A Rip in Heaven (2004).

They criss-cross Ireland in their wagons, mending pots and pans (hence the derogatory"tinkers") and doing farm work, though by 1959, when the novel is set, the work is drying up. We see them through the eyes of 11-year-old Christy Hurley, a lively kid but one racked by guilt, because his mam died in childbirth and he feels he killed her, despite the protestations of his well-meaning father. Christy's role model is his Grandda; he has a fond memory of helping Stephen, as capable as any vet, birth two foals for a desperate farmer. They kept the sickly one; now the colt Jack is Christy's best friend. Grandda has just died as the novel opens; according to Pavee custom, his wagon and possessions must be burned. Christy grabs a newspaper photo from the flames, sensing its significance, though he can't figure out the man, woman and baby it depicts, and he has another preoccupation: school. His first time. Though he loves reading, he's stuck in with the third graders, but the staff are friendly; there's even a sweet, mothering nun, a welcome change from the usual ruler-wielding harpy. Cummins does a fine job showing us Pavee culture: the joy of the open road, the fear of houses (they induce claustrophobia), the dutiful Catholicism, the need for mooching (panhandling) and occasional petty theft. But the coming-of-age narrative is weak. Christy does some sleuthing and discovers he's the baby in that photograph; his mother never died in childbirth. That was a lie, his shame-faced father explains, at great length. What follows is a frantic moonlit ride, bullets, blood and a torrent of tears as Christy learns about the"dream-poison of love." It's all over-the-top, a far cry from the powerful realism of that barnyard birthing.

Uneven, but worth reading for its intimate look at a little-known community.

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Starred review from May 15, 2010
Christy, nearly 12, is an Irish Traveller, a Pavee, a child of motion who, with his family, journeys restlessly from town to town, never staying in any place long enough to call it home. But when his beloved Grandda dies, family secrets begin to spill out, and things begin to change, perhaps irrevocably. Set in Ireland in 1959, Cummins first novel (shes also the author of the memoir A Rip in Heaven, 2004) is a deeply moving and elegiac look at a vanishing culture. Told in Christys vernacular but often poetic first-person voice, The Outside Boy is gorgeously written and an implicit celebration of Irish storytelling. And it offers a convincing and evocative look at a way of life little known or understood by the many foreign to it. Though Cummins treatment of the Pavee may sometimes seem idealized, she is quick to acknowledge their occasional petty thefts and tradition of mooching. Her overriding, beautifully realized theme is larger than that, however: it is the universal desire to find a place where one belongs and peoplewhether ones own family or as-yet-unknown otherswhose presence provides essential comfort, contentment, and completion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)