Daisy Chain War

First published in Ireland in 1990, O’Neill’s novel deals with that period in Irish history quaintly known as ‘The Emergency’, more widely referred to as World War Two. While she reconstructs superbly the minutiae of everyday domestic detail, giving her writing a strong documentary feel, the book’s appeal for most young readers will be in its tale of two cousins, Irish Lizzie and English Vicky, brought together when Vicky, an evacuee, comes to join Lizzie in Dún Laoghaire, just outside Dublin. As the girls grow into young womanhood, O’Neill handles with humour, honesty and, above all, with sympathetic insight, the ‘waiting, waiting, endless waiting’ – as Lizzie calls it at one moment – of their teenage years. Her greatest achievement is that she effortlessly moves beyond the immediacy of her location to present her readers with matters of wide and general concern.