O'Sullivan, Mark

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O'SULLIVAN, Mark

PERSONAL:

Married; children: daughters.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Wolfhound Press, 86 Mount-joy Square, Dublin 1, Republic of Ireland.

CAREER:

Environmental health officer, Cashel, County Tipperary, Ireland; writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

White Raven award, International Youth Library, for Melody for Nora: One Girl's Story in the Civil War and White Lies; Bisto Book Eills Dillon Memorial award, 1995, for Melody for Nora.

WRITINGS:

Melody for Nora: One Girl's Story in the Civil War, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1994.

Wash-Basin Street Blues, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1995.

Nora in New York, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1995.

More than a Match, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

White Lies, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1997.

Angels without Wings, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1997.

Silent Stones, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mark O'Sullivan writes young-adult fiction set in the Ireland of the past and the present. His first book, Melody for Nora: One Girl's Story in the Civil War, is set in 1922 during the Irish civil conflict that followed the country's War of Independence. Fourteen-year-old Dublin girl Nora finds herself adrift when her mother dies and her alcoholic father disperses the children—Nora and her eight-year-old twin brothers—to relatives. The teen ends up in Tipperary with her aunt and uncle. The war comes home in this household, as Uncle Peter and his brother, Jack, take two different sides of the civil war. Bitter and resentful, Nora finds herself drawn into the hostilities "between the government force whom her uncle favors and the Irregulars for whom his younger brother fights," noted a reviewer for Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. While Cyrisse Jaffee of School Library Journal found elements of the book melodramatic, the critic ultimately praised Melody for Nora, saying the setting "is well conveyed and the language is refreshingly reflective of the place and time."

In Wash-Street Basin Blues, the sequel to Melody for Nora, the heroine is now an aspiring pianist who visits 1920s New York. Now age sixteen, Nora is reunited with her brothers Denis and Ritchie, whom she has not seen since the breakup of her family in Dublin. "But the reunion is not as joyful as Nora imagined," wrote Booklist's Laura Tillotson. She worries about Denis's involvement with a street gang; at the same time, a notorious mobster enters Nora's life, offering to pay her tuition to a prominent musical academy. Tillotson faulted the author for "stereotypical" gangster characters, but concluded that "overall this novel stands on its own."

Silent Stones explores the more recent issue of the Irish "troubles" in a story about two teenagers forced to confront their families' pasts. Robby lives with his uncle on a farm in Cloghercee. His father, Sean, was an Irish Republican Army soldier killed in an ambush before Robby was born. When Robby's mother marries a former IRA compatriot, the boy finds himself resentful of both the marriage and the politics involved. Meanwhile, Mayfly and her New Age parents—an upper-class Englishman called Bubbles and a California woman named Andy—have come to Cloghercee to visit the town's legendary circle of stones. Their hope is that the stones' power to heal will help Andy, who is suffering from cancer. The two teens meet when Mayfly uses herbal healing to save Robbie's dog, which has been poisoned. While the vastly different characters at first think they have little in common, Robby and Mayfly eventually form a bond that speaks of the beginnings of love.

Writing in the online An Phoblacht/Republican News, Aengus Ó Snodaigh said that even in a young-adult thriller-romance like Silent Stones "it is near impossible to avoid allowing the author's bias from manifesting itself in the text." A more welcoming notice, however, came from an Interlink Books reviewer, who thought O'Sullivan's work illustrates that "compassion is more important than blame and that love is stronger than all the mistakes people make."