Children's books review: Thrilling reads from a trio of brilliant Irish authors

Irish Examiner

23-05-2025

After by Pádraig Kenny (Walker Books, €7.99)
What, in this age of artificial intelligence, when humanoid robots can interact with us and perform so many complex, decision-making tasks, defines us as human beings?
Apart from biological creation, rather than metal or plastic construction, the attributes that differentiate Homo sapiens from the machines of their own design are becoming harder to distinguish.
For answers, we might even Google an AI-generated definition of what makes us human, yielding a list of key traits that includes self-awareness, abstract thought, moral sensibilities, and a capacity for empathy.
We could also consider the import of After, the post-apocalyptic novel from Limerick-based author Pádraig Kenny, which puts humanity in the spotlight in the context of the collapse of civilisation.
In a 'melding of the mechanical with the biological', humans have been implanted with microchips from birth, giving them access to an information and living system called the Hive.
However, after the Hive turns on the human race, a 'cataclysmic short circuit' occurs, obliterating both machines and humans, the few people who remain resorting to scavenging for food in order to survive.
In this desolate environment, Father and Jen are a family unit, journeying in search of a new place to call home.
After by Pádraig Kenny (Walker Books)
Father's role is as protector, though his child-rearing methods are straight from the pages of a parenting manual and somehow lack the human touch.
Father's application of logic and adherence to rules-based systems give him a calm authority to which many parents might aspire, but it becomes clear that he is not Jen's biological relative, nor indeed human at all.
Despite his appearance, he is made largely of metal components, an AI humanoid that has learned a moral code and patterns of caring, empathetic behaviour — and has somehow survived the short-circuit catastrophe.
He and Jen seek refuge in a self-sufficient settlement of human survivors, but with machines viewed as the enemy, they could both be in danger if Father's true identity is uncovered.
Jen seems to have found her tribe in this settlement, however, and in as much as an AI machine can face a moral dilemma, Father is presented with one when he must choose whether to now relinquish the caring duties he has performed since finding the orphaned Jen as a baby.
If an autonomous robot can learn to develop caring sensibilities, it is more than may be said of the man who invented the Hive, his hunger for power leading him to push the boundaries of technological advancement at all costs, overriding any sense of morality or human empathy.
A futuristic fantasy that also holds a mirror up to today's world, where the milk of human kindness appears to be running dry, and where it is perhaps not AI technology itself we should fear, but those who would subvert its benefits for nefarious ends.
Tales of Darkisle: Conn of the Dead by Dave Rudden, illustrated by Ali Al Amine
Conn of the Dead by Dave Rudden (Gill Books, €10.99)
Trouble magnet Conn has boundless energy and copious amounts of gruesome stories that he feels compelled to tell, regardless of their unsuitability for the occasion.
Tales from Irish mythology are a particular speciality, the more gross details about mucus and bile the better, particularly when he gets into character as the zombie Abhartach, appropriator of body parts and a 'heaving mass of arms and legs and tails and heads — a clot of flesh the size of a house'.
The only person who really understands Conn is his aunt Doireann, soon-to-be doctor of Medieval Irish, and the very person who first introduced Conn to these tales.
It is Doireann he rings, rather than his long-suffering mother, to collect him from the principal's office after a calamitous incident where he has sabotaged the school play by swinging unbidden onto the stage 'like a flailing human conker' to enact the slaying of the Abhartach.
Doireann, unprepared for the sudden arrival of her nephew, scoops him up on her yellow motorbike and whisks him back to her office at the National Folklore Collection at UCD. Sure what could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, inevitably, when Conn spots a box labelled hazardous. And what's an 11-year-old boy-tornado to do but take a little peek inside?
To cut to the chase that ensues when the ancient skull within is revealed; it involves all the horrors that might be expected when an un-dead Abhartach discovers how to use modern technology to its advantage.
The first in a series of 'Tales of Darkisle' from Cavan's Dave Rudden, author of Knights of the Borrowed Dark, this serves as a portent of further fiendish spirits to be resurrected from Irish mythology and re-imagined in new contexts.
Goo, gore, and ghoulishness galore — bring it on.
Solo by Gráinne O'Brien
Solo by Gráinne O'Brien (Little Island, €10.99)
'Music is not something that I do. Music is something that I am. It forms the very fabric of who I am as a person. At least…it used to.'
Everything in Daisy's world was certain. Practise. Perform. Practise. Pass music exams. Repeat.
Not a gifted genius but 'the kind of musician that is built through determination and practise', her life in the year before her Leaving Cert followed a pattern of predictability where she knew the script and was happy to follow it.
Winning prizes for playing the recorder, not renowned as the most glamorous of instruments, might get her picture in the local paper but it has little 'social currency' in the school popularity stakes.
Which is why Daisy was not the only one surprised when sports-mad David chose her as his girlfriend.
Music may have been Daisy's first love but David was her second, and for the month they were together she became so obsessed with him that everything, including music, was cast aside as she helped him follow his dreams at the expense of her own.
Now, just after their first sexual experience, David has unceremoniously dumped her.
Daisy is so devastated that she can't even celebrate her 18th birthday, and the music that was once the core of her existence now offers no solace.
Her parents, who resisted any urge to protest when the boyfriend usurped the place of the music into which so much had been invested, now have their focus turned on Daisy's father's recent cancer diagnosis.
Having lost her boyfriend and her love of music, Daisy is also betrayed by her best friend, and as she struggles to regain a sense of direction, the enormity of the changes in her life threatens to overwhelm her.
Never part of the cool gang, soloist Daisy feels more alone than ever until a kindred spirit helps her find a new path.
Limerick-born bookseller Gráinne O'Brien's verse-form novel digs deep into the uncertainty and self-doubt felt by many on the cusp of adulthood.