Whitethorn Woods
by Maeve Binchy
Anchor reprint, 2008, 446 pp.

As the section headings indicate, Maeve Binchy's most recent book is all about "The Road, The Woods and the Well." The Road in question is a new bypass around the town of Rossmore, Ireland. The Woods are the Whitethorn Woods of the title which the proposed road will go right through. And the Well , located within Whitethorn Woods, is a shrine to St. Anne that will be completely destroyed if the road is built.

St. Anne's Well has touched many people over the years. There is great disagreement as to the holy and/or magical properties of the cave and it's ancient statue. The whitethorn bushes at its entrance are adorned with the petitions of it's visitors. Prayers and pictures, bits of paper pinned to the branches by the hundreds. The bypass is progress - the new, the convenient. The well is history, the mystical, the ancient. One will surely destroy the other if it is allowed to come to pass.

The story is told by many voices, each chapter a different character. All have some link to the town of Rossmore. Some live there, some were born there, some have visited and some have done desperate things there. Each character's bit of the story leads in some way to the next snippet. The chapters are also organized in pairs where the consecutive chapters are a husband and wife or a brother and sister or friends and you are privileged with two viewpoints of roughly the same story. The whole thing sounds like a very complicated way to tell a story. The delightful thing is that it is not at all a complicated or difficult way to read a story. I found that as each person's bit of the story unfolded, I had no problem remembering their relationship to previous characters and tales. The story almost blooms in the mind, each piece adding to the whole picture at a comfortable, easy pace, jolted here and there with the staccato of shocking enlightenments. It is Maeve Binchy at her best.