Very long book lots of details at the beginning not enough detail towards the end. Great detail on the history of NY. Little disappointed about the ending but overall good read!

A little slow to start but Hamill's use of details kept a vivid picture of how New York City had overcome being a "lesser city, unlike Boston" to a pulsating melting pot of American culture. I found it very interesting how Cormac's character remained virtually unchanged through all the 300 years the story took to unfold.

While most of the other gals in this book club liked this one, I have to admit it fell outside my normal genre and sometimes outside my comfort zone. While the book was made more interesting to others because of all the details about New York and its history, I found myself bored by the same facts. There were a few times when I got lost in the book as time skipped ahead, or when I (truthfully) had glazed over some fact earlier in the book and therefore couldn't make the connection later on. There were many times when I thought that the plot and Cormac's actions did not seem true to his character as well. And I also thought that the author should leave the enchanted to someone else to write since he interjected it into the storyline. It just didn't flow, or make sense most of the time.

I did like the premise of the book, and when Cormac's character was being driven by his "quest" I was right there with Pete Hamill, letting him take me from Ireland to New York, and beyond. Unfortunately this quest was repeatedly abandoned, and I thought, it lost some of the excitement of the book overall. But like I mentioned before, this was not my typical read.

I gave this book a 2 because I believe that many people will read this and like it- especially if you have ever spent any time in New York city. I however felt it was too long, skimmed over all of the 19th century (which would have been the most interesting to me), and didn't do a good job of sharing time between the city and Cormac. I have read several books where the setting actually becomes a character of its own, but not in this book. My own test for a book is if I must buy it after I read it, or if I just have to read it again: For this book I didn't do either.

The theme of the book was great but the author just took way too much time with mundane details and then didn't really develop the characters enough that you really cared about what happened in the story. There were some up moments and some good thought provoking ideas which will make for a decent discussion but overall I found this book to be too long and often boring.

The group as a whole liked the book and found the history of NYC very interesting but were very disappointed that the 20th century was left out of the story. Several of the members commented on wanting to know more about the Celtic mystics and early religion in Ireland. Almost everyone felt that the book did go on forever - in other words it could have been shorter, but we wondered if this was something that Hamill was actually working on when 9-11 occured and that was why it was tied up like it was and left out so much of the interesting history of the 1900s in NYC.