A haunting novel that weaves together its narrator's dreams, Irish legend, and the pivotal events of the American Civil War, The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan portrays a family of Irish immigrants struggling to find its identity in the new world, and a nation struggling to be born anew out of the carnage of war. Mairhe Mehan is sixteen, a resident of Swampoodle, Washington D.C.'s Irish slum. Here brother Mike, a laborer building the new dome of the U.S. Capitol, suddenly enlists as a volunteer in the Union Army, leaving Mairhe with her father, an ailing old man whose heart is in the Ireland he has left behind. Terrified for her brother's life and alone in a Washington filled with the fighting's chaotic overflow, Mairhe confronts her own choice between Ireland and America s the Civil War heads toward its defining moment at the Battle of Gettysburg.With several ALA Notable Books to her credit, Jennifer Armstrong is an author with a fast-growing reputation. Her strongest and most profound work to date, The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan is a novel of great thematic breadth and memorable emotional impact.