Childhood Interrupted

by Kathleen O'Malley

Book Overview

In 1950, Kathleen O'Malley and her two sisters were legally abducted from their mother and placed in an industrial school ran by the Sisters of Mercy order of nuns, who also ran the notorious Magdalene Homes. The rape of eight-year-old Kathleen by a neighbour had triggered their removal - the Irish authorities ruling that her mother must have been negligent. They were only allowed a strictly supervised visit once a year, until they were permitted...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844081184
• ISBN13: 9781844081189
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Couldn't Put It Down!

I give this book five stars although it had several grammatical errors, because I simply couldn't put it down! A nun once told Kathleen that her mother was more sinned against than sinning, and I couldn't agree more. This book had me in tears as I thought about how Kathleen's mother must have felt. She was a single mother who was doing a fine job raising her daughters. Although they were poor she gave her girls everything they needed. Her only crime had been to have children outside of marriage. Many people who grew up in these industrial schools were robbed of their lifes potential. Like Kathleen they were brainwashed into believing that they were the lowest of the low. It's sad that so many children were abused in the name of God, and so many familys were torn apart for nothing more than being poor. They said Kathleens mother was destitute, yet her mother provided more for her daughters than the industrial schools ever had. This book will make you angry, and then it will make you cry, and when your finished reading it you will have an ache in your heart for the people who went through these institutions.

Absolutely Unbelievable

I love the way the author explain her life with a lot of love to her mother and no remorse for the misstreating she received first as a child and then as a teenager, leaving nothing to imagination, using a language of a very high quality and taking the reader hand by hand all the way until the end. It is the best book of this kind l've ever read.

There but for fortune...

For obvious reasons, it isn't easy to read this book. It shouldn't be, of course. That said, one thing comes across even more than the sickening conditions O'Malley had to live through, and that is the resilience she has shown in getting on with her life after surviving the horrors of her childhood. That is perhaps the only reason why I was able to make my way through the graphic descriptions of what life at Moate was like. O'Malley wisely makes each of her descriptions of the various forms of abuse fairly brief, so there is nothing gratuitous about the ugliness of it all. She tells you what you need to know - which is more than anyone would want to know - and moves on to the next example. Though horrible, the details need to be told. While she acknowledges throughout the book that she remains "unutterably angry" at the system that destroyed her childhood, she often sounds less so than one would expect. It's probably something only a survivor could understand. It's not all gloom and doom. The undying love and admiration of her mother, who was persecuted throughout her life for being a single mother, shines through everywhere. I often found myself thinking that had a lot to do with why O'Malley survived it all with her sanity intact. I am also filled with admiration for how she was able to get her life together when it was all finally over. Naturally, her journey of self-discovery as a young adult is an unusual one, but that's a key part of the story and a vivid illustration of how the abuse she suffered did not end when she was finally released at age 16. As the final pages - dealing with her continued efforts to find justice for her family and others like it - make clear, it still hasn't ended. She also relates the stories of many other survivors who haven't fared anywhere near as well as she has, which is one reason why her story is so important. Above all, whether she meant it to or not, this becomes a story of a person who fought back and won. Like I said, it's not an easy story to read. But it is an inspiring one!

Elegant and Gutsy

Ms. O'Malley has written an elegant, yet gutsy, recounting of her childhood spent with the Catholic nuns in an Industrial School in Ireland. I found it to be both riveting and heart-wrenching. This is an extremely readable book dealing with concerns that are on-going in our society today.