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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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