Praise for Map of Ireland

“In Ann Ahern, Stephanie Grant may have created the best tough-girl character since Scout Finch.”
— Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Wayward

“In Map of Ireland, Stephanie Grant has written a novel of hard times that is a jagged jewel of perfection. With Ann Ahern, she has created a protagonist of fierce individuality, daunting irony, and always surprising courage – it is as if Charles Dickens had written a tomboy."
– Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter & Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

 

Riveting, clear-eyed, brutally honest, Grant's story draws us into the Boston racial crisis brought to a head during the busing campaigns in the seventies. In the midst of this struggle, out steps Ann Ahern – one of the most disarming, haunted, and gorgeously conflicted narrators to come along in years. You will love this girl. Ann Ahern will charm you; disarm you. She will enrage you, but she will never let you go." – Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals

 

Stephanie Grant's fast-paced but beautifully turned new novel brings to troubled life once more the South Boston of the 1970s. It also brings to life Ann Ahern, a bright, wisecracking teenager who is part Huck Finn and part Holden Caulfield – as well as a maturing young woman with sexual longings for certain people who are both the 'wrong' race and the 'wrong' gender. Ann's freckled face, she's told, is a map of Ireland – but it's also a mask that Stephanie Grant strips to reveal a funny, sad, deeply sympathetic character." – Mary Jo Salter, author of Open Shutters and Sunday Skaters

 
“The world of South Boston, 1974: a white neighborhood fighting change that came in the shape of school buses carrying African American children from Roxbury. Such is the backdrop for Stephanie Grant’s novel, Map of Ireland. Ann likes playing with fire, both literally and figuratively. Grant’s true gift is her uncanny ability to climb inside the skin of a character.”
— Nisa Donnelly, Lamda Literary Review
“Grant’s doubly transgressive coming-out novel, about a 16-year-old working-class white Irish lass with tough-girl courage – and a crush on her black basketball teammate and her black Senegalese teacher – challenges racial and sexual norms in the era of Boston’s contentious forced busing. ”
— Best books of ‘08, Between the Lines

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