@hellohannah2 Thank you for those kind words. I love watching Evie having these little revelations and awakenings. She is doing a wonderful job of handling the flood of new emotions. I really love the way you write. As I'm reading you're pulling me in and I become Evie too. She is so wonderfully relatable and it is very easy to feel what she feels.
We do have a quite a mix of different backgrounds. For a time we didn't have any real class system or social structure like Europe had. So if a person had the ways and means to get here they could escape the much more oppressive life in Europe. Those negative stereotypes of the Irish arrived with the immigrants from England and even now are still canonized in the culture. To the majority of Americans Saint Patrick's Day is merely an excuse to get drunk and wake up on the 18th with a huge hangover and your head stuck in the toilet as you relive the 17th in reverse.