"Girl with green eyes" is actually based on a previous edition by the title of "The Lonely Girl" which in turn makes part of the "The Country Girls Trilogy." It is a semi-biographical account, a personal reaction to the author's early life experience in an environment (Ireland - early sixties) marked by bigotry, prudishness, poverty, and emigration. Because of O'Brien's use of a sensuous prose and graphic sexual content her books were banned in Ireland. Her work however, obtained success in other parts of the world. O'Brien has written plays, children's books, essays, screenplays, and non-fiction about Ireland.
The main characters, Kate and Baba, have had a strict Roman Catholic upbringng, in a family farm in Dublin; both are insecure, and when their lives face an upturn they are not able to overcome their social constrains, they become victims of their upbringing. They are destined to fail in their marriages and have a disillusioned adulthood.
O'Brien's writings express concern with the status of women in society, their disappointments in sexual love, and their inability to reach happiness and fulfillment given the social constraints which bind them. Her male characters tend to be violent, treacherous, or weak, while the heroines experience solitude and frustation.

The cover of this edition is curious and belies the real subject of this book. It's hot pink background and depiction of lipstick, perfume bottle and a sealed letter, promise a sweet romantic story for girls on the go. I picked this book up because of the author's notoriety and because I am currently interested in literature about Ireland.

Perhaps this book is out of date and perhaps since the 60s it has been upstaged by current issues and stories. I am told that when it was published it was banned from Ireland. The subject matter remains serious and, although not shocking in the strictly moral sense, it is emotionally unnerving. The brutal loss of innocence is never easy to witness and this book proves this.

This is the story of Caithleen, a country girl of 22 who is working in Dublin in a grocery shop. She meets an older married-but-separated man and becomes smitten. She eventually moves in with him in his isolated house outside the city whereupon they are both menaced by her father and his peers for living in sin. Other constraints spell doom for this couple. Caithleen is neither sophisticated enough for Eugene's social milieu nor wily enough to compensate her lack of cleverness through other charms. Eventually she conspires to leave him in the naive belief that he will follow her. He doesn't follow and thus her broken heart is doubly battered. That pithy old saw, "marry in haste, repent at your leisure" seems to apply here, in a direct way for Eugene, and in bitter irony for Caithleen.

Edna O'Brien is an adept storyteller and this piece moves relentlessly towards its bitter end without a single sidetracked moment. She is clever enough to refrain from comment on Eugene's callous nature and his overriding irresponsibility and, through his actions, shows that he is his own unwitting victim. Caithleen's hope, bafflement, disillusion and raw pain are all at the fore of this tale. To my mind, given that loss of innocence is not yet out-of-date, this book is as current today as it was in the early 60s.

The story is embedded with details of Dublin: Clery's department store, O'Connell Street, The Liffey, the Customs House, Molesworth Street, the Shelbourne Hotel and an ashtray with "Guinness is good for you" written on it in red are among the cited Dublin icons which surround these characters.

Mary McNamara's life in rural western Ireland is that of a typical young teenager until one day while she is on a walk on their land, her father violates the most sacred bond between parent and child and rapes her. Unable to tell anyone, she keeps the secret, except for her diary entries. When the abuse results in an unwanted pregnancy, it precipitates a national crises when she is taken to England for an abortion.
Based on real events, this novel accurately portrays how a Catholic nation can be inflamed over a cause such at this even while the morality of the citizens is in decline as evidenced by premarital sex, living in sin, affairs, and out of wedlock births.
While I enjoyed the story of Mary's plight, the novel itself was often times confusing with so many characters and shifts in focus so that after awhile you sort of lost track of who was who. By the end I was thinking it could have been told in a much more straightforward manner in less pages.
Mary's father, James, the obvious villan in this book, is a tragic figure. He seems a contradictory character, gentle with his livestock, proud of his daughter's accomplishments at school, and missing her presence, even while he violates her. Without a wife to serve his needs, it seems Mary is to fulfill that role on all counts. In the end it is hard to feel much more than pity for this pathetic nature.
Mary, for being all of fourteen, seems stronger than either of her parents in enduring the many hardhsips and allowing herself to be used by different fractions for their own purposes. It is hard to imagine what her life would be like afterwards, though the last pages try to give us a glimpse of her new life.

They say the curse of the Irish is the drink. But to understand your own brutal, beautiful country as well as Edna O'Brien understands hers must be a bigger curse by far. There's no way a blessed person could have written a novel as shimmering, as ruthless and as devastating as "Down by the River": it's evidence of something more than mere talent, or even genius, at work. O'Brien's gifts are magnificent and terrifying, along the lines of stigmata and clairvoyance -- the kind of gifts that mark you.

Inspired by a case in Ireland, in which a 14-year-old rape victim was forbidden by the courts to leave the country to obtain an abortion, "Down by the River" is the story of Mary MacNamara. After being raped by her father, Mary conceives his child. A sympathetic neighbor brings her to England for an abortion, but the authorities haul them back, cowing them with their ugly threats. Mary refuses to name the baby's father, and her case becomes a cause that turns her own friends and neighbors against her. She's seen as both a villain and an object of sanctimonious condescension in the Catholic community.

That community's cruelty is the bitter, driving force of the book -- but it's Mary's suffering and loneliness that are at the heart of it. After a street musician befriends her (he lets her stay at his flat for a few days and buys her a cheap sweater), she writes him a letter: "I nearly died when you gave me that jumper. You shouldn't have. Turquoise is my favorite color. There are two kinds of alone, there's the kind which you are and the kind which I am. Your alone is beautiful, it's rich." It's a passage that takes you apart, the way a teenager's breathless enthusiasm is crushed by the young woman's overwhelming sense of fear and isolation.

O'Brien never takes the easy way out: not even Mary's father is painted as a monster. She describes how he helps birth a colt -- reaching into the mare's womb and coaxing it out by both brute strength and force of will, saving the mother's life in the process -- with such grace and tenderness that even against your will, you feel yourself almost, almost, growing to understand him.

But O'Brien doesn't hold back when it comes to her wrath at the Catholic Church, and at the small-minded Irish who slavishly follow it at the expense of their own humanity. O'Brien has lived in London for more than 20 years -- she isn't welcome in her own country, for obvious reasons -- and yet Ireland will never leave her. Her stories work on us exactly the way her homeland has worked on her. They can stare you down and tear you apart like a wolf -- and then, miraculously and tenderly, bring you back to life again, stronger and better than before. With "Down by the River," O'Brien marks us as well: it's the kind of book that takes days, maybe weeks, to shake.

Edna O"Brien's story of a young girl who becomes pregnant by a relative is based on a true story.Her version successfully captures the horror and shame thrust( by supposed christians and do gooders) upon the victim of incest and rape who is too young and naive to really understand why she can't have an abortion,or why she has become of such interest to so many people.A thought provoking and sad novel which calls in to question any one who believes that all abortion or a woman's right to choose should be illegal.

"A Pagan Place" is one of the earlier novels by Edna O'Brien, written in 1970. Set in an unknown place in the Irish countryside, the story has no beginning, and no end, and it's quite difficult to establish what in fact constitutes the content of this novel. All dialogues are gone, for they are embedded in the narrative, so that you not always know who is saying what, with all those pronouns; for how else would you cponstruct a dialogue when you wanted to hide the attribution of what is being said and by whom? He said, she said, he noted, she noted, he said, she said, ad nauseam. If only it were clear how to attribute the reported speech, but it is not, unfortunately. Characters appear from nowhere, without any explanation as to who they are, and truth be told, it is not all clear at the end of this novel. All these effects were intended, and one might suppose that by doing this, the author wanted to force our concentration, to have our senses sharpened to the maximum. I have put quite much effort in reading this volume, which by the way took me four months to complete, and I did concentrate, but then the end result was miserable, I must say. "A Pagan Place" is clearly inspired by James Joyce and his stream of consciousness experimental fiction. Dialogues, thoughts, narration, descriptions are all fused together and words flow in meandering streams the directional gradient of which appears to be random. The invisible narrator refers to you personally, although the persona being spoken to is actually one of the characters. It's mightly confusing, but would be acceptable if it were the only literary experiment devoured in this book. As it is, all the aforementioned elements combined make the book hardly readable. The message, if there was any, was lost. Having arrived at the last page, I thought that if the book was half shorter, or half longer, it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, and that is unforgivable. With a background of the story as rich as this one, O'Brien might have done much better. I guess she sacrificed everything on the altar of postmodern experimentation. All her books carry this stigma, but "A Pagan Place" features imbalance between traditional structure and experimentation. Therefore, reading this novel is a one-of-a-kind experience, a literary intellectual exercise, but not much more than that.

This book examines the female experience of being an artist, being Irish, and coming of age. Sound familiar? Edna O'Brien updates James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. She is sensitive, connecting paganism, sexuality and death, quickly (within the first 15 pages of the book). The protagonist struggles with her Irish upbringing, which connects Christianity with purity and chastity. Unlike Stephen Dedalus, she cannot use religion as an ordering device which he can eventually and ultimately reject. Instead, this protagonist becomes immobalized by the struggle between the two and unable to transcend the very society that entraps her. Like Joyce, O'Brien uses stream of consciousness techinques, but without the utter sense of chaos and disillusionment. She is subtle and she allows other voices to speak in her novel. For example, "You tried to whistle. Only men should whistle (parent voice). The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs (voice from church). It intrigues you thinking of the Bledded Virgin having to blush so frequently (protagonist's voice). The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the curlew (teacher's voice)." Edna O'Brien's voice is a multifarious voice which captures many of the voices that surround a child coming of age. This is a book about identity that will dazzle you with its writing and with its final outcomes. I not only read this book when I was studying in Ireland, but I now teach this book in an Irish Literature class in the United States. This is a must read.

This book did not live up to a previous read "The House of Splendid Isolation", which was mysterious and adventurous. Although I like the fact that O'Brien challenges her readers and makes one search out and think about the mysteries at hand, I found O'Brien's writing style to be too confusing and ambiguous this time. She used pronouns indiscrimately without making a reference to the subject even in the previous paragraph. The writing style was so mixed. After Nell began using drugs the writing became "stream of consciousness" quite a bit; one para of a chapter was even written in the second person while the rest of the book was in 3rd person except for "soc" mentioned above. Motivations were lacking, thus some of the characters were archetyal and cliched such as Nell's husband, Rita the young housemaid, and even Nell's mother to some extent. Part iV where Paddy drowns, was too tragic, grief-stricken, and morose to even read it all. I skimmed as if "peeking through my hands" at a scary or chilling movie. I thought the descriptions and characterizations of the sons was well done and I could empathize with the vacillations of feelings between sons and mother. Nell was a real character who had lots of flaws, whom you could love yet criticize for her poor choices motivated by heart rather than head.

Edna O'Brien has written a novel so bleak and despairing I'd call it a book to cut your wrists by. Is the experience of womanhood all about pain, deprivation and loss ? Is there no joy in the bargain ? You wouldn't think so, judging by the experience of Nell. The cruelty of her husband drives her to seek emotional refuge in her two sons but when they leave the nest, she turns in desperation to a series of unreliable lovers who bring her more misery. The relentless feeling of despair beating upon Nell reaches its climax when she loses Paddy, but by then, the reader is too numb to care. It doesn't help that O'Brien's prose is often dense and turgid. Some critics call it poetic or lyrical, which may be so, but the jerkiness of some of the episodes (eg, in the middle section, with her lovers) makes the narrative difficult to follow. It is sometimes even hard to tell who she's writing about. Her characterisation is also weak, though this may be deliberate. O'Brien isn't interested in anybody other than Nell. The supporting cast of characters are only there to help create the soundtrack playing through Nell's mind. The message that O'Brien delivers on motherhood isn't redemptive either. Paddy's and Tristan's alienation from Nell is, not surprisingly, reminiscent of Nell's estrangement from her own mother. The horror of Nell's emotional existence reaches a crescendo when she stares at a half crazed baglady one day on the streets and sees the ravaged face of her once young housemaid, Rita. There is no more powerful image depicting the madness and despair that will take hold of Nell. "Time and Tide" is emotionally exhausting to read. It isn't quite the artistic failure it is made out to be, but O'Brien could have lightened her touch a tad ! This is not a book for everyone.

"Time and Tide" is an excellent literary novel, very emotional in style and essence. I was deeply touched by this book, and I am very grateful to one of my friends for recommending me Edna O'Brien as an author. Snip: (...)

This is just about the worst piece of crap I've ever read. Sometimes I really wondered how anyone can lable Edna O'Brien a writer. Nothing interesting happens, the charachters are the most non-colourful (can you use that word?) I've ever read about and the circumstances are just unbelievable. A 21 year old girl who knows nothing about nothing. Just cries all the time, thinks she is fat, and dreams about the perfect man (who she by the way thinks only exists in movies and such). On top of all this it's just so badly written. It's like " on the evening we talked about going to a party. Then we went to bed and slept. When we woke up we put on make-up and went to that party..." I mean... it's not like very good reading. I don't recommend it.

If you're looking for a pulp fiction romance don't read this book. On the other hand, if you are open to a subtle, thoughtful book more akin to good literature than dime store characterizations then consider reading The Lonely Girl, a "slice of life" fiction that gives us a peek into the life of a very young, very immature, Dublin girl who has an affair with a much older man. At first blush I was fustrated with the girl thinking she didn't have much of a backbone. But when I started to think more about her age (21) and her utter lack of worldly experience I thought the author did an excellent job depicting the emotional gulf that permanently separates the two: the girl has not had a chance to mature and become her own person, how can she ever maintain a relationship with the older, more worldly man? I think many women (if they are being honest) will also see a bit of their young selves in the Lonely Girl.