SOURCE: "Two Novels Look at Life in Northern Ireland," in Chicago Tribune Books, June 8, 1997, p. 8.

In the following review, McGonigle commends the narration of Reading in the Dark.

The North, Northern Ireland, Ulster, The Six Counties. How you name that part of Ireland that is part of the United Kingdom reveals your politics, religion and attitude toward what has been going on there since 1968 and, of course, how you think about the 800-year entanglement of Ireland and England.

There is no neutrality when it comes to this situation, and if I write about Seamus Deane's autobiographically driven novel, Reading in the Dark, as being a tremendously moving depiction of a sensitive Catholic boy's growing up in Derry, I have already given myself over to the Nationalist Republican side of the argument, because no Protestant, no Loyalist would ever refer to the city of Derry as anything but Londonderry...