The Raptures tells the story of a little girl, named Hannah, in a village called Ballylack.

Hannah is a shy but determined little girl and she comes from a very strict Protestant and Evangelical. Then two strange things happened during the 1993 summer holidays. First, Hannah’s classmates start dying. Then, one by one, they come back to haunt her. In this village, there is a miniature epidemic that  causes  the deaths of these children. There is a tree, ‘The Raggedy Tree’ . Hannah thinks that the death of the children and the fact that she didn’t get sick has something to do with this tree.

The Raptures has a very accurate portrayal of parish life in Northern Ireland. I was fascinated by the « feminist »elements. Hannah’s father is the power holder in the family and Hannah’s mother has always had little power in her life, but the stress of the mysterious illness unleashes the forces within. She hangs up on her husband after a phone call and feels a major shift inside her, a kind of feminist awakening, and she « knows now that she could raise her voice to her husband. In The Raptures , the author has seamlessly merged the theme of the mysterious epidemic with many others: family ties and love, survival in a time of conflict, small-town insularity, exclusion and otherness, pre-adolescent fear. Yet all the while the heart of a young girl is beating steadfastly.