“I can feel our bravery fall away as we journey into the wood. We are not built for this. We are not the folksy teenagers you see in adventure stories. There is no one who’s a dab hand at archery, or who can chart our journey by looking at the last few visible stars.” (371-372)
Every Gift a Curse is the third and final in Irish author Caroline O’Donoghue’s YA ‘Gifts’ trilogy, following All Our Hidden Gifts (2021) and The Gifts That Bind Us (2022). They’re about Tarot cards and rituals and magic and witchyness and the kind of love (and sometimes hatred) and belonging that comes with deep, deep knowing, of a place or another person or oneself. I read the first one in 2021 following my cancer surgery when I didn’t really know anything about anything any more and I was very very alone; like all the best YA novels, I think, it was bittersweet and nostalgic and allowed some sort of easing of the heart when looking back at one’s own thorny teenage years and the friends and fears and desires that entangled them.
Narrator Maeve O’Callaghan (aged 16ish) is worried about her performance at school in the run-up to exams, her place in her family, and her social status. She takes up Tarot reading for fun in the first novel, enjoying mystifying the classmates at her all-girls’ Catholic school, to whom she’s something of an outsider, or a floater between cliques. A mysterious card called The Housekeeper starts appearing in her pack, a wispy and elusive figure from folklore that nevertheless wields strong and dangerous powers. Maeve ends up in a fight with her childhood best friend Lily, who disappears suddenly; Maeve tries to figure out what happened, and why a handsome and charismatic American named Aaron who seems to represent a malevolent fundamentalist church and youth group–the opposite of everything she stands for–seems so interested in her, and interesting to her. Meanwhile, her attraction to Lily’s sibling Roe deepens, as does her friendship with the popular Fiona, and her confusion about everything she thought seemed solid–until strange powers and magic come to seem real and reasonable. In the second novel, The Gifts That Bind Us, Maeve and her friends find that they have shifted from a support group to a coven of sorts, as they keep trying to unravel the mystery of the sinister conservative (a mixture of Puritan asceticism and Catholic ritual, with the most misogynistic and homophobic aspects of both) Children of Brigid cult, and the ultimate meaning and power of The Housekeeper.
It’s difficult to say a lot about Every Gift A Curse without spoiling the first two in the series–which is actually testament to how well they’re woven together, with consistent characterisation and overarching plot lines. The setting is ‘Kilbeg’ in Ireland, but pokes gentle fun at Celtic magick cliché and outsider stereotypes of the island, while noting the very real traumas of colonisation and religious domination. Maeve and her friends are fun and sparky–both their lighter moments and their tensions seem realistic, while Maeve’s relationship with Roe is rather sweet and wonderful, despite Maeve’s fraught dynamic with their sister Lily. The third book doesn’t have quite as much space for the friends as the other novels do, which is a pity, but overall it’s a satisfying conclusion–my five stars is for the series as a whole.
(Review title from Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Stranger Song’. “You try the handle of the road, it opens, do not be afraid“)
