An ambitious and well-rendered tale of early 1900s New York.
Gordon presents a fictional account of the devastating 1911 Triangle Waist Company fire.
Catherine Tassone immigrates to New York City at age 15 in 1906 to support her family after their home in San Giuseppe, Italy, is devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Seventeen-year-old Jacob Brosky moves to the city the same year from the Pale of Settlement region of Russia after his family is murdered in a pogrom. Black Americans Sarah Johnson and her husband, Will, own and live in a store in the city’s Hester Street Market and bear the scars of local race riots six years before. These characters’ lives intersect in unexpected ways as they live and work in Manhattan tenements and sweatshops. Catherine and Jacob are both employed at the Triangle Waist Company, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, themselves immigrants, who “pinched every penny and sweated every employee to control costs and maximize profits.” The factory is on the eighth through tenth floors of the newly built Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street, across from the Johnsons’ store. It’s also a firetrap, crowded with people, clothing-manufacturing machines, and flammable materials. Michael McMahon is a young firefighter who regularly saves people from burning tenements; as he and Catherine become romantically involved, the dangerous working and financial conditions at Triangle come into sharper focus, culminating in the tragic fire on March 25, 1911. Gordon effectively interweaves accounts of the lives of people who lived and died on the fateful day of the fire with details of New York City political movements of the early 1900s. This absorbing, educational read particularly considers unions’ progress in organizing for better wages and working conditions in the garment industry, as well as the machinations of the notorious Tammany Hall political machine. The novel also features vivid descriptions; at one point, for instance, a reporter asks a firefighter, “What will you remember most about this awful day?” After a moment, the rescuer responds, “Today. . .it rained children.”
An ambitious and well-rendered tale of early 1900s New York.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781304812421
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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