Book Review: Her Irish Inheritance

Title: Her Irish Inheritance

Author: Michele Brouder

Date: 2019

Quote: "In order for the hospice to receive the money, you have to take the gift of the land."

Caroline Egan, middle-aged, divorced, has a career as a hospice nurse. She's planning to take it to the next level as a nurse practitioner. But of course young women, even those old enough to feel a need to touch up their fading blonde hair with henna--why else would the author tell us Caroline has bright orange hair in chapter one, then change it to blonde a few chapters later?--never know what's best for them, in the world of some romance novels. Caroline's hospice patient knows. What Caroline really needs is to take a long leave from her job and spend some time in Ireland, if only enough to sell the house. Her American ex was called Kevin, but an Irish name isn't everything. Given a few acres of land as an attraction, Caroline is sure to meet the right sort of Irishman and settle down...well, she's too old to have babies, but she'd make a good stepmother...

So Caroline, henna fading with every shampoo job, lands in Ireland with believable honey-blonde hair, and promptly bangs into a man's surfboard with her new car. How unromantic can a first meeting be? But this is a romance. Hormones conquer all. 

I tend to laugh at romance novels, but one thing that redeems this one is that it's realistic. Brouder doesn't drag Caroline into a horrible slum or set her in a castle. She emphasizes the middle-class, contemporary, un-exotic quality of Caroline's future home. The house needs major renovations to be sold for enough to pay for air fare. There's enough difference in her and Patrick's accents that his children giggle about her "sounding funny," but they understand one another perfectly well. Brouder describes beautiful beaches, long northern summer days, and food that's almost but not quite the same on both sides of the pond. Caroline's grandmother came from Ireland--a war bride?--so she can apply for Irish citizenship if she decides she likes the place. She does, not because she's especially sentimental about the green and foggy landscapes of her ancestral home, but because she's attracted to Patrick and his children.

Without making one of the characters a bit obsessed with being Irish and wanting to go back to Ireland, or a struggling artist or writer who wants to take advantage of the stipend for "cultural workers," it is hard to make the Irish-American-goes-back-to-Ireland-for-love storyline work. I'm no fan of heroines who need other people to tell them what they really want--if what they want is marriage and children, I like them to know that and choose their pink-collar or independent-professional-who-can-work-from-home jobs accordingly--but I can believe that...

Oh, whom am I trying to deceive here? This is a short novel that feels hastily written. It reads as if the author wrote a standard romance outline and sat down to flesh it out with precisely counted words to fit into Amazon's marketing plan. With talent and determination that writing plan can be made to work. The plot is believable. Caroline could reasonably consider moving to Ireland because she likes being a nurse and there's work for nurses there, too. She wants more distance from Kevin, she has no living family in the States; given any emotional inducement to stay in Ireland, we can see before she goes, she'll stay. It's still a fun read, about as believable as romances need to be. It could have been better.

If you wanted literary merit, you'd be reading Pearl Buck or Selma Lagerlof or Amy Tan. If you want a sweet romance with a discreet hint of passion, if you dream of going back to a modernized, middle-class, but still scenic Ireland where you might still be able to trace distant relatives and old family friends, your mind will fill in gaps with details like the henna (the book does not actually mention henna), and you will enjoy this novel and the author's other Irish-American repatriation romances.