Karen Robards’ brilliance lies in her ability to take historical events, add fictional characters, and wring us dry emotionally as her strong, independent female protagonists march through important historical events risking everything to follow their beliefs. “The Moonlight Runner” takes us to Ireland in 1918. The Great War, as they called World War I, has just ended, but instead of being felled by a German-speaking enemy, people are being killed by an invisible organism known as the Spanish flu. Living in a small Irish town on the coast is Rynn Carmichael.
Rynn is from the small town of Bundoran, and she is trained as a nurse. She works at the mansion outside of town, Ballyshannon Court, which has been repurposed as a convalescent home for soldiers of the Great War. The Duke of Hartford is the owner, and his younger son Thomas is Rynn’s patient. Thomas is in love with Rynn, but she has a childhood sweetheart, Donal.
It’s Donal’s foolhardy attempt to thwart the British and strike a blow for an independent Ireland that causes trouble from the first page. He and his friends are running illegal guns, and when Rynn overhears an officer remark, at a party at Ballyshannon where he thinks he can’t be overheard, that they have an ambush planned, she rashly races to the beach where she plans to warn Donal and his friends.
It turns out that she’s forced to get in the boat with the men when they are seen by the British. And just before they would all be killed in the ambush, they are saved by Owen Maguire, a taciturn businessman who has been successful after the war. But Rynn was seen, and the British suspect that she is a part of the rebel group even though she is not. So when there is a threat that the British will arrest her, Thomas offers to marry her. It’s no hardship for him — he’s in love with her. Rynn likes Thomas, and she has decided that Donal does not hold a future for her. He’s too foolhardy and rash, so as much as she cares for him, she has told Donal that they are no longer engaged. She accepts Thomas’s offer.
Life with Thomas is easy. Rynn gets to experience what it’s like to be an aristocrat in London as they live with his father, the duke. Thomas is a younger son, not the heir, but he’s still wealthy in his own right. As the relationship between Rynn and Thomas grows, Rynn is ambushed in London by Donal and his friends, who desperately need her help and her knowledge of nursing. Because they are being hunted for their rebel activity, Rynn knows that she can’t be seen helping them. Maguire helps her help the rebels even as he warns her to stay away from trouble.
Robards masterfully balances the story of Rynn’s life with Thomas with her actions to help the rebels during the real historical events that happened in Ireland and England at that time. We see the creation of the Black and Tans, unemployed rank-and-file ex-soldiers who were given a mandate to stamp out the rebellion and kill any opposition. They enjoyed their assignment and cruelly executed not only their orders, but the guilty and even those innocent of rebellion. Whole villages were slaughtered, families killed.
It’s almost impossible not to feel engaged in the horror of what happened in Ireland as Robards brilliantly combines the explanations and descriptions with the action. Rynn is a hero, and what is surely true is that there really were many heroes who fought for what was right in spite of overwhelming odds against them.
One of the joys (and horrors) of reading historical fiction is the light it often shines on current events. In this magnificent novel, we see the bravery and selflessness of those who opposed oppression, who fought for their rights, and who braved danger to do so. Today, we see those who do the same. There are those who put their own lives at risk fighting and protesting for what is right and for justice in spite of a system that seems truly corrupt. Over and over throughout history, there are those people who have done the right thing, the noble thing, to strive for a more just government. Alphonse Karr said, “The more things change, the more they are the same.” Time after time, country after country, people fight for independence and for self-governance against an unjust government. Robards’ novels masterfully showcase that universal truth.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.
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