Review by Emer Martin from Amazon.co.uk

Highly recommended, November 27, 1999
Reviewer: Emer Martin, from New York
The Elysium testament is a great book. Instantly compelling and disturbing. It is the story of Nina; a difficult highly complex middle aged woman whose life is disturbed by the birth of a son, Roland. Nina is such a fascinating refreshing character that she defies all cliches. Her childhood was fraught by the death of her mother; the distance of her twin, and a loving but obsessed father who drives her to be a swimming champion. She is not a particularly warm and loving mother, she questions the very act of childbirth itself, and the sacrifices of Motherhood that women are meant to mutely accept as their lot.

Throughout the narrative she admits to physically abusing her son, beating and pinching him. Her daughter Elinore knows this but heartbreakingly her only response is to write letters to a magazine agony aunt, which she can't bear to send. Nina's husband Neil, a dentist, is having an affair with his dental assistant and prefers to keep out of the way. He is unable to deal with his own family life. Their lives slowly unravel as Roland creates altars in their atheist middle class modern Irish home and proceeds to levitate, at the supermarket, at a party, and in his bedroom. One of the most extraordinary things about this book is its portrayal of the ordinary middle class Irish family, which has often been ignored in modern Irish fiction or dismissed entirely. Despite the sadness of the book the writing sparkles with intense wit and Nina is extremely funny in her biting observations. I laughed outloud at the line, "Perhaps at some dinner-party, it will break the odious recitation of Junior and Leaving certificate results with which parents in the middle years like to sodomise one another."

Mary O' Donnell's writing is clear and luminous. In the beginning she says "Relax. I'm not about to lay bare a series of grievances, turn my life over like a tongue of riddled wood and reveal lice in the form of yet more hurts. But I want to tell you..." And so she does tell us, a startling story of modern day saints, psychiatrists, twins real and imagined. The double is always a theme here. The split self, the damaged self and ultimately and triumphantly, the transcendent self. Highly recommended.