An engaging escapade with a feisty female lead.
A debut historical novel focuses on an adventurous young woman living in Seattle before and after Washington Territory was granted statehood.
It is 1889, and Anna Gallagher is 19 years old. As a child, she was brought to Seattle by her grandfather Oscar after her parents and grandmother died of smallpox in Ireland. Oscar owns a bookshop in town and Anna works for him. Her grandfather wants to find her a suitable husband to secure her a stable future, but the independent Anna has her own agenda. She craves travel and excitement; she is not ready to be tied down by marriage. Her most passionate dream is to be the first woman to scale Mount Rainier: “She’d always wanted to travel around Washington Territory, or take to the sea like her brother Levi, even though it wouldn’t be proper. Every time she looked up at that mountain, it was as if it was daring her to do something great.” When an explosion and fire race through Seattle’s main shopping street, shutting down all businesses, Anna has time to indulge in one of her favorite pastimes: long walks in the woods. There she meets Heather, a member of the Duwamish tribe, who lives off-reservation with her baby and grandmother in a cabin deep in the woods. The developing friendship between these two young women, a relationship that infuriates Anna’s bigoted grandfather, is the connection point for several intriguing plotlines that run through the charming narrative—a treasure hunt for a hidden emerald ring; the protagonist’s training to join a climbing expedition up Mount Rainier; and the issue of Seattle’s reprehensible treatment of Native Americans. Navigating around one or two suitable eligible bachelors, the spirited Anna makes secret plans to achieve her aspirations. McGillen has penned an appealing and gentle tale about relationships; Anna is more Nancy Drew than Wonder Woman. But the mystery of the ring is a satisfying puzzle, and Anna’s struggle to find her place in a society that wants to constrain her within appropriate gender roles is enhanced by the author’s attention to details—of fashion, culture, and even mountain climbing.
An engaging escapade with a feisty female lead.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73342-392-2
Page Count: 358
Publisher: The Evergreen Bookshelf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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