The Last Prince of Ireland (Mass Market Paperback)

An interesting story of Donal O Sullivan, one of the men who falls often into the shadow of the other big fellas of the times, Hugh O Neill.

Following the Battle of Kinsale (i.e., slaughter, massacre, etc.), the lord of the land, The O Sullivan, decides to lead his people away from the ravaged land northward to the bastion of the remaining "irish", ironically, to the modern mind, in Ulster. In the dead of winter, an unusually hard one, with little food and mostly desperation, how do you lead your people to the tentative safety far away? This paints a vividly bitter picture of the devastation wrought upon the Irish poor by the English army and Foreign Policy.

This is an intense story, if a bit thin on character development and plot. Survival is a plot, even if it doesn't move quickly. Survival was the goal - physical survival. But, physical survival was always seen by the lords as concurrent with survival of what was "Irish". That seems the bitter truth - in the effort to simply survive, much of what we once treasured is lost to the ravages of time and expediency.

Perhaps with the looming shadow of war today, we could read through this and take another look at the geography of the world today - and ask ourselves whether our government is just allied with the English, or acting like their forefathers.

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The details are rich and abundant, but instead of bringing the suffering and minior triumphs to life, they seem to weigh the novel down. Point of view shifts are numerous and abrupt, though not necessarily confusing, but I wonder about how truly effective they are. However, what bothered me the most about this novel is that the characters inspired little emotion in me. After being blown away by Llywelyn's *Lion of Ireland,* I was fully prepared to fall in love with the characters. I was waiting to be absorbed by every word, every action, every tiny detail. And I wasn't.

Though this novel is not bad by any means, it is, if you've read any other Llywelyn novel, disappointing. I would not recommend starting with this one. Read *Lion of Ireland* first to see what this normally wonderful author is capable of.

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