“O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle,” Magical Adventure in Self Discovery for All Ages

The Sight is a metaphor for any number of things; among them are things like “hopes, dreams, and the childlike ecstasy of discovering the world as if for the first time, of finding out who we are and what we were put on this planet to do. Most of us rather stumble into the lives we lead.

This second book in a series by author/illustrator Jeremy McGuire about the intrepid leprechaun, O’Shaughnessey, takes up where the first left off, that is, with the young protagonist Bobby Mahoney grown up and with children of his own. As is usual in the growing up, Bobby has lost the ability to see leprechauns and is only faintly aware of ever having had it.

McGuire says he didn’t intend to write a sequel to the successful O’Shaughnessey: A Boy and His Leprechaun but people kept asking about it. “I believe that if a sequel cannot be as good or better than the original, it’s best to leave it alone.” But despite his protestations the contrary, there was obviously the nagging suspicion that there might be more to the story. He knew that it would involve the children of the seven year old boy from the first book, and eventually he settled on only one of them, twelve-year-old Margaret McNiell Mahoney. “I Knew this much,” McGuire said, “Bobby had lost the gift of seeing leprechauns and I knew he would get it back but if he did, it would be through his own children.”

While the first book was intended for ages 6-12, The Faerie Circle is written for an older audience between 12 and 17 and is much more detailed and nuanced. “Margaret is twelve years old, in the between-time, not a child and not yet a teen-ager, just on the verge of womanhood,” McGuire says. As anyone can tell you, it’s in the between-times, the paradox times, when the invisible world is most accessible.

The title of The Faerie Circle comes from the main action of the story. Bobby, desperate to regain the Sight and having been told not to step into a circle of mushrooms, does, and is whisked away to the Court of the Faerie King, Finvarra, where he is kept as a husband for the princess. Circles of mushrooms, called Faerie Circles or Faerie Rings, have long been reputed to be gateways into Faerie.

McGuire says, The Sight is a metaphor for any number of things; among them are things like “hopes, dreams, and the childlike ecstasy of discovering the world as if for the first time, of finding out who we are and what we were put on this planet to do. Most of us rather stumble into the lives we lead.” Bobby has lost The Sight in the growing up and travels to Ireland with his daughter, to study folklore and to get it back if only he can put his finger on what exactly it is that is he’s lost. Losing and gaining The Sight is the main theme of the book.

“Of course, Margaret will have none of it.” McGuire says, “She is, after all “the brightest pupil at the La Madeliene Academy for (Exceptional) young Ladies and has no room in her life for such silliness as leprechauns and faeries’ The leprechaun O’Shaughnessey has persuaded a reclusive shenache (storyteller) named Moira McCarthy to take the visitors in, hoping that Bobby may eventually be able to see him again. Moira however, is, also, a “guardian of the Invisible World.” Many there are who want to have commerce with the faeries and it is she who either allows it or sends them on their way depending on their motives.

This is another of the themes in the story, McGuire says, how improper it is to demand what is not given. “It’s the difference between the American and the European way of thinking. Americans tend to be more commercial, even in the realms of the imaginative, the emotional or the spiritual. If they take the time, trouble and expense to go to Ireland to see faeries, then the faeries had darn well better show up or they’re going to want their money back. They might even sue.”

Moira is suspicious of the visitors…until, that is, she is introduced to Margaret. She recognizes in the young girl a kindred spirit with a latent Sight that is greater even than her father’s, for once having given up the Second Sight, it never comes back entirely. While Bobby is engaged in gathering folk tales in the town, Moira and Margaret tend to the farm. Margaret quickly adapts to the hard work and the total lack of modern conveniences like running water, electric lights and television. As time slows down, she is at first bored to death, and then intrigued as she begins to notice things that she had always been too distracted to see before.

McGuire says that is another point of the story. “How we distract ourselves with external entertainments, how we schedule and plan all our children’s time so they don’t have the freedom to explore who they are.” This theme is exemplified in a portion of the book that addresses Margaret’s status as the brightest pupil in the intermediate class at her school:

“Laureen had begun to notice something in her daughter that disturbed her. She seemed to have forgotten how to play. Headmistress Evangeline Drysdale was first to notice. ‘It isn’t easy being a Golden Child’ she’d said to Laureen, ‘When you are as smart as Margaret is, accomplishments are taken for granted that would be praised in other girls. Much is expected of her. She is afraid of being wrong, takes getting less that an ‘A’ on her assignments personally and that makes her less able to take chances. She needs to take it all less seriously. She needs to play.”

All the while they are working, whether hoeing cabbages, gathering eggs,or washing laundry in a hand cranked machine fashioned from a whiskey barrel, Moira McCarthy entertains the girl from her stock of faerie stories. Margaret is intrigued by the old woman who is constantly muttering prayers for everything from baking bread to making butter, and holds daily commerce, she says, with Maeve, the Faerie Queen for whom the McCarthy family has preserved a large area of woodland. When Margaret expresses skepticism Moira laughs, “The Five-Senses World is a small island in a vast ocean of all we cannot see and do not know. In that ocean, there may be faeries.”

As the two women, one near the end of her adult life and the other just at the beginning, grow to trust each other more, Margaret gains much understanding not only about the world of Faerie, but also about the troubles of her own life, the growing distancing between herself and her parents, as well as their fighting over diminished hopes and disappointed expectations. “Darlin’ girl,” the shenache tells her, “People fight because they have not chosen well. It’s not your burden.” Under Moira’s tutelage, Margaret learns the value of choice. “The marvelous thing about being a grown up is you get to choose what you want and what you don’t want in your life.”

And how about the title character, where in this story does O’Shaughnessey fit in? McGuire says, “O’Shaughnessey, has a little less to do in this book; it really is about the growing relationship between Margaret and her mentor, but what he does do is critical. He takes her, as he did her father before her, into the land of Faerie, but only in twilight dreams, half-sleep dreams, the ones that occur only at the point that no one remembers the next morning, the exact moment of falling asleep. In these dreams, O’Shaughnessey shows her the world the way the shenache sees it filled with wonder and magic and divine energy.”

The leprechaun comes to Margaret in dreams because her rational mind refuses to believe in faeries so she can’t see him otherwise, which is one form of the kind of faerie glamour that hides them from our sight. O’Shaughnessey’s mission is to get humans to believe again, for, as he tells his friend O’Sullivan, “We need them to believe in us…It’s their belief in us that sustains us, protects us – yes I would go so far – protects us from the poisoning of our world.”

“Yes,” McGuire laughs, “O’Sullivan, the cranky misanthropic, shabby leprechaun is back in this adventure…reluctantly.”

In addition to writing the story, McGuire also drew the 24 pencil illustrations that are inserted throughout the narrative. In the previous book, he adopted the pen and ink styles of nineteenth century illustrators that he most admires. In this one, he went to pencil drawings. “I thought the subject a little more nuanced than what I was capable of in ink. So I reverted to the softness of graphite.

“O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle” is available on
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