"Women in the Judgment Hall" serves up a rich, unpretentious tale of a broken-down South American country, with no attempts of white-washing the fears and frailties of the marginalized. *** Ana is a brazen, idealistic teenager intent on carving her own destiny beyond the unspeakable poverty of the Tenement yard, while Reeda, her more subdued Indian friend, struggles to find her inner strength and contend with the life of subjugation imposed upon her by her family. *** The novel, told with brutal honesty, brings to light the poignant story of their journey into womanhood, and quest to reclaim their voices within a society ready to judge them at every turn. *** In a backward country where wayward men are exalted, and where flogging is seen as a mechanism to "'set yuh woman straight'... "can these women flee the wicked sentencing within their 'Judgment Hall'?
Excerpt from Women in the Judgment Hall Intent on not feeling the pain, my other senses took over, and I started to notice other things that were not so obvious before, like the frumpy smell that oozed out from under MaTine's skirt and those almost raised stretch-marks that ran over her lumpy thighs from as far as my strained eyes could see until they disappeared in the area beneath my face, and I shuddered at the thought of those disgusting marks being contagious, and suddenly my facial skin in the area that pressed up against her sweaty thighs was scratching, but I dare not move.

A mere 150 years ago Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in Canada, and Irish was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. A new awareness of the large North American Gaelic diaspora, long overlooked by historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, has emerged in recent decades. North American Gaels, representing the first tandem exploration of these related migrant ethnic groups, examines the myriad ways Gaelic-speaking immigrants from marginalized societies have negotiated cultural spaces for themselves in their new homeland. In the macaronic verses of a Newfoundland fisherman, the pointed addresses of an Ontario essayist, the compositions of a Montana miner, and lively exchanges in newspapers from Cape Breton to Boston to New York, these groups proclaim their presence in vibrant traditional modes fluently adapted to suit North American climes. Through careful investigations of this diasporic Gaelic narrative and its context, from the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the book treats such overarching themes as the sociolinguistics of minority languages, connection with one's former home, and the tension between the desire for modernity and the enduring influence of tradition. Staking a claim for Gaelic studies on this continent, North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.