false 6089298 3 Kim Echlin's second novel, <I>Dagmar's Daughter</I>, draws on ancient Sumerian and Greek myths to tell a tale of three generations of women on a tiny, remote, and fictional island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off Canada's East Coast. Norea, the oldest of the three, escapes the crushing poverty of her native Ireland by stealing her mother's boots from her coffin just before burial and hopping a boat to Canada. Dagmar, her daughter, has strange powers to influence the weather and grow plants. She falls in love with a charming rogue named Colin who fathers a son and a daughter. The girl, named Nyssa, grows up to be a talented fiddle player and gets involved with an older musician who had once loved her mother. Nyssa also pursues her dangerous fascination with the island's oddest character, Moll, a self-mutilating crone who harbours mysterious powers of healing and destruction. <P> Moll's mythic function in the novel feels a bit forced, and the author's relentlessly poetic prose can become exhausting at times. But there is a brilliantly heightened sense of craft, story, and setting reminiscent of another wondrously sharp and strange East Coast novel called <I>The Shipping News</I>. Ultimately, Echlin's sensitively wrought tale of women struggling to own both their passion and their bodies is a rich and rewarding read. <I>--Nigel Hunt</I> 6266232 2001 Dagmars Daughter total:1|3:1| 1 3 1 0 3 0 false false Sun Feb 08 07:58:28 -0800 2009 Sun Feb 08 07:58:28 -0800 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=6089298