I am currently reading The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. It is a memoir. (I am on a memoir kick right now and have read just about everyone recently published and if I haven’t read it I am probably on the waiting list at the library for it.) Anyways, it takes place shortly after WWII in Ireland. It is about a boy whose father is Irish and his mother is German and how difficult is was to grow up in Ireland when everyone in Europe was still hating all things German. To make a bad situation worse, his father will only let the family speak Irish (which hardly anyone in Ireland speaks) or German, which no one in Ireland speaks. They are strictly forbidden from reading anything English, listening to English music or playing with children who speak English. And I thought my parents were strict!
