Point of View

Maeve Binchy narrates Light a Penny consistently in third person omniscient, while making frequent use of dialog and letter-writing to establish characters' unique styles and points of view. The novel proceeds in chronological order from 1940 through 1960 following in the main characters Elizabeth Mason (née White) and Aisling O'Connor (briefly Murray). Elizabeth is an English child, sent during the German bombing of London to Kilgarret, Ireland, to live with Aisling and her family. The girls' birthdays are within weeks of one another; they are ten years old when the story begins. Their mothers had attended convent school in Liverpool decades earlier but had lost contact over the years, thanks to Violet White's unresponsiveness.

The early part of the novel deals in how a Protestant British city girl gets accustomed to village life in Catholic Ireland as part of a large family. Sean O'Connor voices the age-old...