A Boy from Ireland

In mist-laden Connemara—where craggy peat bogs still echo with cries from the Great Famine—twelve-year-old Liam O’Connell lands at his uncle’s hearth, only to be branded enemy for the English blood he inherits. When his mother’s sudden passing propels him across the Atlantic to turn-of-the-century Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, Liam finds that old hatreds travel trunks: Irish gangs hurl slurs as fierce as the rain on his homeland, and a relentless Connemara cousin tracks him through cobblestone alleys and over crowded tenements in a horse-drawn wagon. Torn between two worlds, Liam’s journey threads through Industrial-Era labor streets and rural uprisings against British rule, exposing the raw edges of Immigrant Rights, Racial Justice, and the cost of inherited prejudice. Each stolen glance at a street-corner schoolhouse or a whisper behind an iron fence reveals how violence breeds new violence—yet also how a single boy’s courage can challenge centuries of enmity. Will Liam rescue his own future from the cyclone of ancestral grudges, or will the old battlefields claim him too? Learn more to follow his fight for identity and belonging.