Musings of a reading addict

Keywords: Irish folklore, fairy changeling myth, historical fiction Ireland, Hannah Kent novels, Bridget Cleary case, Michael Leahy case, superstition and belief in 19th century

Genre: Historical fiction

Length: short medium long

Country: Ireland

Review

“Some folks are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”

Short introduction to Irish folklore

There was a time in Ireland when fairies were considered as real as the neighbours next door. Except they weren’t called “fairies”, that would’ve been dangerous. “The Good People” or “the Gentle Folk,” were polite nicknames meant to keep them appeased. The Good People weren’t harmless beings. They were blamed for spoiled food, sick livestock, sudden deaths. At the same time, they could bring blessings if treated with respect. Farmers left out food or drink, iron charms were kept in doorways, and herbs were scattered at thresholds — not out of quaint custom but genuine caution.

The darkest part of this belief system was the fear of abduction. Fairies, it was said, had a taste for human company, especially babies and young women. When they took someone, they left a double behind — a changeling. Changelings weren’t the stuff of bedtime stories; they were sickly children, restless infants, wives who fell ill and never recovered. A child who didn’t grow properly, who cried without end, or who simply didn’t fit expectations could be branded as “not ours.” And once that suspicion took root, families often tried anything to bring their “real” loved one back, from herbal remedies to rituals by fire. The result, tragically, was that real children — disabled, ill, or simply different — suffered violence in the name of folklore.

This is exactly what happened in 1826 in County Kerry, when a four-year-old boy named Michael Leahy was believed to be a changeling. He had developmental issues and did not thrive like other children, which was enough for suspicion to grow. His grandmother and others attempted a “fairy cure”: immersing him in the river to drive the changeling out and force the Good People to return the real child. Michael drowned, and the case was brought to trial.

It is this chilling episode that directly inspired Hannah Kent’s The Good People, with Micheál’s fate in the novel echoing Leahy’s almost detail for detail.

That wasn’t one isolated case though. Decades later, in 1895, the case of Bridget Cleary in County Tipperary would make international headlines. Bridget, a young woman who had fallen ill, was accused by her husband and family of being a changeling. Over days she was subjected to rituals to drive the fairy out, and ultimately she was burned to death. Unlike Michael Leahy’s case, which survives mostly in local records, Bridget Cleary’s death was exhaustively reported in newspapers, dissected in court transcripts, and remembered as “the last witch-burning in Ireland” (even though it was fairy belief, not witchcraft, that killed her).

The novel

“What woman lives on her own with a goat and a low roof of drying herbs? What woman keeps company with the birds and the creatures that belonged to the dappled places? What woman finds contentment in such a solitary life, has no need of children or the comfort of a man? One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.”

There are books that are painful in a way that makes you want to close them, and yet you can’t — because their pain is also their truth. The Good People is one of those books. Reading it was like being slowly drawn into a shadowed valley where the air grows thinner, where the world feels smaller, where light itself struggles to reach. By the end, I felt as though I had walked through that valley myself, carrying a weight I wasn’t ready for but couldn’t put down.

The story follows three women bound together by grief, desperation, and belief. Nóra, an older woman who has just lost her husband after losing her daughter too, finds herself the sole caretaker of her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. Once healthy, he has become severely disabled — unable to walk, unable to speak. The boy’s condition is never named — they do call him a paralytic at the end of the novel, however that’s not a clear diagnostic… perhaps it was cerebral palsy, perhaps something else — but in the rural Ireland of the 1820s, there was no diagnosis, no treatment, no framework of understanding. To his grandmother and to the villagers around her, he is not simply a child with an illness; he is seen as “other,” perhaps even a changeling left by the Good People. Anne Roche, going by Nance, the local “handy woman,” is the last of the old healers, living on the margins, half-feared, half-relied upon. She has the knowledge and is familiar with the ways of The Good People. And then there is Mary from Annamore, a young, redheaded servant girl, caught between loyalty and terror as she witnesses the lengths these women will go in their search for deliverance.

“Nora had always believed herself to be a good woman. A kind woman. But perhaps, she thought, we are good only when life makes it easy for us to be so. Maybe the heart hardens when good fortune is not there to soften it”

The rituals in the novel are some of the most haunting passages, suffocating. They are described with painstaking detail, at once mundane and terrifying. Herbs, smoke, fire, water — nothing is neutral, everything has a weight, a purpose. These scenes are not written as distant curiosities but as lived experiences, charged with urgency. You feel the desperation in every gesture, every whispered word, every attempt to coax, to force, to drive out what they believe does not belong.

The priest, too, hovers over the novel as a figure both of authority and futility. He speaks of God’s will, of sin and penance, but his words ring hollow in a place where hunger gnaws louder than sermons, where fairies feel more immediate than heaven. His presence only sharpens the tension: science has not yet arrived in that remote place, religion offers little comfort, and so people cling harder to what remains — the old stories, the old cures, the old fears.

For me, as someone who works with children with special needs, this was particularly devastating. To read about Micheál not as a boy, but as something “other,” a burden to be explained away by fairies — it was heartbreaking. And yet Kent doesn’t reduce this to simple cruelty. She shows the full complexity of a community grasping for answers in a world that offers very few. When a child cannot be cured, cannot be “useful,” cannot be recognized as fully human in the eyes of his time, what then? The answer here is both tragic and chilling: he becomes a vessel for fear, for anger, for superstition. When faith, fear, and grief converge, logic stands no chance.

And yet what struck me most was how believable it all felt. Kent never lets us sit comfortably in the judgment of the past. She draws us into these women’s grief and desperation so fully that even when their choices horrify, we understand how they reached them. Nora is not a villain; she is a grandmother unraveling under loss and exhaustion. Nance is not a witch; she is a woman clinging to the only knowledge she has left. Mary is not naïve; she is trapped in a situation with no right answers.

But beyond the pain of the novel, I also found myself strangely grateful. Reading about this world — where illness was mystery, where disability was interpreted as a curse, where families were left to face impossible burdens alone — made me realize how much progress we have made. Science and medicine, which we often take for granted, have transformed what it means to care for children like Micheál. Families now have access to diagnoses, therapies, support networks, and in many places, the state itself steps in to help. Of course, not every society is equal, and not every family has the same opportunities, but compared to the terror and ignorance of the past, the change is staggering. Kent’s novel is a painful reminder of how privilege can make us forget the sheer miracle of modern medicine and the safety net it provides.

The Good People is not an easy book. It offers no comfort and no catharsis. But it does what literature should sometimes do: it bears witness. It pulls us back into a past where belief and desperation intertwined, and it asks us to look — really look — at what suffering, isolation, and lack of knowledge can do to human beings.