This review can be found on Amaranthine Reads. 
 A young girl in Ireland has supposedly lived on no food at all for months on end, claiming that she is living off "manna from heaven" and English nurse Lib has been sent over from England to watch her to make sure the claim is valid. Surrounded by religious superstition, Lib must get to the bottom of the miracle-or stop the destruction of a young girl's life. 
 This book was basically a short story fleshed out with too much inner monologue and chatter about not a lot. The plot was intriguing enough for me to wait until the very end to find out how this seemingly innocent young girl is defying all the laws of nature and existing on no food and very little water (cheeky two-way bet that it's god or subterfuge), but altogether that was basically the whole plot. There were no side plots, nothing coming in at the sides except a crude attempt at a romance and basically quite a lot of anti-religious sentiment. I don't feel I can say anything about Ireland and Religion, but I should hope that anyone trying to do so would do it much better than Donoghue did. 
 It takes 50% of the book to get to anything relatively interesting. We are following basically every second of Lib, the protagonist, as she walks to and from her watch of Anna: we have around four pages of actually following her every footsteps. Once we begin to hear about this mysterious Manna from Heaven it gets pacier, but then drops off again and falls down dead in the bog. It is a slow book, with little characterisation and completely dull happenings. The only good thing about it, and why I've gone for two stars instead of one, is that it is written really well, but only in factual terms. 
 I enjoyed the structure of the book. Grammatically there was nothing amiss and the few typos there were can be forgiven. The dialogue I always thought was really rather good and gave enough information to keep it all alive but didn't kill the story by giving away too much. Punctuation and everything else that is taken in to account when talking of factually good writing was good. Well done, Emma. 
 But that is the only praise one can give such a ridiculously tiny, short-sighted book. I also wasn't keen on how the protagonist was ready to drop her knickers as soon as a man who wasn't in to the working-class superstitions of rural Ireland comes along and, whilst his role as the reporter come to blow the whole thing wide open was a welcome jolt to the absolutely monotony of the book, the way he intermingles with the protagonist is ridiculous and unnecessary. 
 A technically well written book, but a ludicrous and ultimately boring story. 
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