MIRACULOUS MEDAL

A historical novel about a small group of characters living and working in mid-20th-century Baltimore.

The latest book from Koesters, a sequel to Union Square (2018), takes place in Baltimore and concentrates on a few days and four characters: young girls Marnie Signorelli and Alice Smaling, Catholic priest John Martin, and a poor parish worker named Jezriel “Jeb” Heath. Koesters follows each of them through the everyday events and vicissitudes of their lives over the course of Easter Week in 1964. Each of the book’s four long sections places the focus on a different character, taking readers into their inner worlds and, in the process, providing a composite and ultimately beguiling portrait of Baltimore 60 years ago—a Southern city characterized, in this book, by old-style Catholicism and lingering racism. The latter is handled with unflinching realism, as when Jeb, who’s Black, remembers hard-edged advice that he received from the men who taught him how to shine shoes regarding how to use the city’s streetcars: Give your fare to the driver without touching his hand, he’s told. “Then you go all the way to the back and sit down….If a white lady or white man have to come in the back, you get off the street car and walk the rest of the way you going.” Koesters follows her small cast of central characters through their involvement with both church and personal faith, from cerebral, compassionate Father John to impulsive young Marnie, who “knew what everything was, just about, but not always the best way to solve a problem,” her friend and neighbor Alice, and Jeb, who “was forty and looked sixty.” The latter’s internal drama is the most commanding strand in a work that, at its best, invites richly deserved comparison to that of Ernest J. Gaines.

A richly empathetic portrait of four strivers in life and faith in old Baltimore.