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… and to take over my life
Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a ghost-tinged Irish historical novella in which a famine-era journey becomes a story of survival, courtship, folklore, and the inheritance of memory. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Well, it’s difficult to give one simple answer. The Canterbury Tales and The Wizard of Oz were literary inspirations. So were stories of elves, fairies, and leprechauns I heard as a pre-schooler, along with family stories I heard about the Great Famine. I had long assumed that the famine had driven my family to come to America. But then, in recent years when I took up genealogy, I learned that my family did not arrive here until the 1880s or so (decades after the famine). I ran up against the paucity of good Irish records for pre-famine family histories. So, gradually, a story began to take shape in my head … and to take over my life, a bit, for a few weeks or so.
This storytelling is something of a mysterious process to me. I mean, I did not set out to explain my great-great-grandparents’ experience of those times, then embellish the tale with a few folklore nuances. Writing for me is more like playing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (characters, conflicts, themes, snippets of history) and exploring how they might fit together in an interesting way.
How did you approach writing the Great Famine in a way that honored its suffering without letting the novel become emotionally one-note?
I did struggle a bit with that, as indicated in the Introduction.
I’m not aware of very much wonderful literature to come out of the famine. Maybe it is there and I’ve overlooked it. But it has seemed to me, it is almost a taboo subject. Unlike war, there is nothing much heroic or romantic about starvation. I’ve seen probably dozens of films about WWII, but can only think of one major motion picture about the famine (2018’s Black ’47). So I wanted to pop the lid off and take a look at this time period, without strong notions about what might unfold.
Now, given my family history, it occurred to me that, even though the famine killed or displaced some 25% of the population, many families not only survived but in some cases must even have profited from others’ suffering.
It was too simplistic to blame the British government for the whole calamity. I saw in the Canterbury Tales a framework for laying out a range of human character types, with all their shortcomings, that might have been on display.
Once I started to follow that path, I had begun to avoid monotony. But I did find myself getting caught up in the romance, toward the end, and had to be careful not to lose sight entirely of the horror.
Folklore feels inseparable from daily life in the book. Was that balance shaped more by historical research, family stories, or imagination?
A little of each. But again, the lack of reliable history was a factor. So we’re back to: “Never let the truth (or lack of it) get in the way of a good story.”
Toto the pig brings so much texture and vitality to the story. When did you realize she was essential rather than incidental?
Somewhere along the way I read an old review of The Wizard of Oz, and realized I’d never given much thought to Toto and the role the little dog played in the story.
Toto represents innocence, but a knowing, uncorrupted innocence (not unlike that of the little boy who points out the emperor has no clothes).
It is Toto who pulls back the curtain on the Wizard. When I realized how appropriate that was, iI realized it would be quite nice to have the pig pull off the Hag’s cloak.
Now, in Tom Ryan, there’s another dimension to the pig. Toto represents a few good meals worth of meat. So it’s a marvelous thing she survives the journey.
But Toto the pig isn’t entirely there for explanatory power (as a metaphor for a relationship between innocence and wisdom). She’s there, too, to allude to the Wizard of Oz, to resonate with a story-telling tradition and our shared childhood memories.
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The Irish countryside has turned perilous. Starving families line the roads; ruthless land agents enforce brutal order. Soup kitchens trade food for faith as secret societies lurk in the shadows. And always nearby is the enigmatic old seer known only as The Hag, who dispenses cryptic wisdom, demands small services, and intervenes in destinies with unsettling precision.
Tom Ryan’s Shoes: The Legend of the Banshee Castle is historical fiction infused with Celtic legend, magical realism, and mythic storytelling. Rich in atmosphere and grounded in the history of the Great Famine, this coming-of-age adventure blends folklore, literary depth, dark humor, and historical drama into a powerful tale of resilience and transformation. A Literary Titan Book Award winner.
Tom Ryan’s Shoes
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
