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This book just won the "Booker Prize" for 2023, so I was eager to read it. I confess to being somewhat disappointed . . . or perhaps it is more that I was disappointed in myself for struggling to stay with it. No doubt, Prophet Song is exquisitely written and tells of a type of tragedy we all should fear just now--the rise of an authoritarian regime that ends all pretense of equal treatment under the law. Perhaps I desired more top-down information, material that would enable me to see how this "Irish" terror had all come about, when the author's real intent, and an important one, was the view from the bottom . . . one family's desperate struggle to stay together first as opponents of the state and second as refugees, their numbers terribly diminished by violence, real and supposed. It is an intimate and harrowing story, but I began to wonder as I found myself struggling to finish this book, why I was not feeling more emotion and drive to reach the end. Perhaps, I have little faith these days that any of our world's various flirtations with authoritarianism can have a happy ending and what I was bogged down in was my own unhappy visions of what could lie ahead for all of us.