T.A. Keenan’s Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a famine tale told as family legend, with one foot in hard history and the other in Irish folklore. The book opens in 1933 Connecticut, where an old manuscript tucked inside a pair of shoes brings an 1846 story back to life. From there, it turns into a road story, a courtship story, and a ghost-tinged inheritance story all at once. What gives it shape is the sense that memory itself is part of the plot. This is a book about how families carry things forward: land, grief, jokes, warnings, and stories polished by retelling.

What I liked most is the way Keenan lets the famine stay present without reducing every scene to misery. Tom and Frank move through a countryside full of hunger, cruelty, and fear, but the novel keeps making room for talk, oddball humor, local characters, and flashes of generosity. That balance matters. It gives the book motion and humanity. The pig Toto is a smart touch too. She could have been a gimmick, but instead, she helps keep the story earthy and lively, which suits a novel so interested in survival at the level of the body.

The strongest thread running through the book is its belief that folklore and practical life belong together. The bean feasa, the raven, the little men, and the story of Lady Edith all deepen the novel rather than floating above it as decoration. Keenan uses the uncanny to talk about care, justice, and obligation. One of the book’s best lines is, “Farewell! May you never wear a soldier’s buttons.” That lands as both blessing and warning, and it captures the novel’s moral core better than a speech ever could.

The prose has a storyteller’s ease. It likes voices, side characters, and scenes that feel as if they were meant to be read aloud near a fire. Sometimes that means the book wanders a bit, or leans into anecdotal charm more than momentum, but even then it stays readable because the voice is so enjoyable. I also liked that the ending doesn’t just wrap up a romance. It circles back to storytelling itself, and to the way embellishment becomes part of family truth. When Quill says, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” I felt like the book is smiling at you and admitting exactly how it works.

This is an affectionate and imaginative historical novella that treats Irish memory as something lived, argued over, and handed down. It’s interested in courtship, class, famine, faith, and the strange half-magic logic of oral tradition. More than anything, it feels made by someone who wants these people, and this inheritance, to remain vivid. I came away thinking less about plot twists than about atmosphere and lineage: worn shoes, old roads, family voices, and the stubborn desire to keep going.

Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GRV2NV9D