The Magdalen. By Marita Conlon-McKenna. Bantam. £5.99 in UK

In many ways it's a familiar story: innocent country girl becomes infatuated with handsome, strapping lad; bodily fluids are exchanged; girl gets pregnant and suffers for the rest of her life; boy gets off scot-free. The Magdalen puts a crueller spin on it, though, for in this case the boy in question marries his boss and prospers, while the girl is summarily rejected by her family and sent to join the "fallen women" of the Holy Rosary Convent in faraway Dublin. She has become a "Maggie" - and this is the part of the story with which many Irish people are still not familiar at all - forced to slave away, pregnant, exhausted and under-nourished, with the other "sluts and prostitutes" in one of the institutions known as Magdalen laundries.

In her first book for adults, the acclaimed children's writer Marita Conlon-McKenna doesn't shy away from the brutality of the situation: many of the women who share Esther's plight are, for all the Catholic Church's fine talk of penance and redemption, effectively slaves, and the nuns whip them into shape - sometimes literally - without so much as a hint of kindness or sympathy. The babies, once birthed and weaned, are simply whipped away, never to be seen again. She paints a desolate yet vivid picture of these desolate souls: a pity, then, that it takes more than 200 pages to get there. The first half of the novel recounts , with maddening slowness, the somewhat tedious love story, all "deep kissing" and slow dancing, with a sub-plot involving the death of a younger sister for which Esther is blamed, and a host of gap-toothed peasant folk straight out of Central Casting. Things improve dramatically - for the reader, if not for Esther - once she arrives in Dublin, where strong characters and lively dialogue combine to move the pacing into a higher gear, only for "The End" to suddenly loom up in an abrupt and unconvincing final chapter. Perhaps a sequel is planned. If so, perhaps Marita Conlon-McKenna will not, next time around, subject her adult readers to the ponderous, fauxnaif style of sentences such as "Romance and sexual pleasure, that's what had brought her to this, and yet somehow she had to believe that God intended for this child to be born, and for her to carry it".

Kathy Cremin lectures in Women's Studies and English at the University of York. Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist