Description:

Cathleen McCaffrey has just watched her beloved grandmother die, surrounded by strangers chanting meaningless songs, burning sage and sweet grass. The Ojibway people of White Earth Minnesota with whom her grandmother chose to spend her final years claim she is their blood relation and ask her to take on the family mantle of Bear Clan Shaman Healer. How can a White woman raised in White society possess a hereditary responsibility to an Indian tribe, Cathleen asks them. They present her with a box of relics and a black notebook written in her grandmother's hand in answer to her question. Embittered by the abandonment of all who said they loved her and morally bankrupt from the life her father has forced her to live, Cathleen embarks on a journey of discovery, a journey toward self as she opens the notebook to read the story of the relics that she has laid out before her, the story of her grandmother's journey to a collective and personal reckoning of self. Her grandmother's story carries the seeds of her own destiny...

Review

Ms. McCarthy weaves a beautiful tale, rich in the history of an Indian Nation. A tale torn with bitterness and grief, it enlightens the soul as THE HOLLOW takes you on an incredible journey to another time, another mind set. Not your usual run-of-the-mill romance story, it is nonetheless a romance to the core. An exceptionally satisfying story of finding the inner peace within us all by reaching into the past-and reaching out for the future. -- The Hollow, Rhapsody Book Reviews, July 1999

About the Author

Cathy McCarthy was born May 24, 1952 in Ottawa Ontario, Canada. She spent much of her formative childhood on a farm in the Gatineau Hills, just north of Ottawa with her grandmother and two elderly aunts. Here she gained a spirituality and an appreciation for all that surrounded her that translates into all her writing. She currently resides in North Carolina with her husband Jim and daughter Emma. From the time she was first able to put ideas to paper, Cathy has pursued her muse in writing works of fiction and non-fiction alongside the more practical aspects of keeping body and soul. After thirteen years of a professional career in systems librarianship, and two more as an ISP provider, she heeded her primary calling and retired to pursue a writing career. Except for necessary diversions into the working world, Cathy considers herself first and foremost a storyteller and a keeper of legends. Cathy holds a four-year Bachelor of Arts in History from Ottawa University and a Masters in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also pursued studies in Film Art and Propaganda, Creative Writing, Native American History and Shamanism, Celtic Shamanism and Public Administration during her lifetime. While The Hollow represents her first commercial publication of fiction, Cathy is published in peer-reviewed journals associated with her profession and has been privately published throughout the Canadian Federal Government. Along with The Hollow, Cathy has written another Awe-Struck offering: Dissent in Real Time, a story of computer espionage and government control. She is also two-thirds finished with her third manuscript, The Voyage, a story of human will and love in the face of overwhelming physical disability.