A gripping but uneven story of a young woman obtaining her independence in a new land.
An Irish immigrant forges a new life in a turbulent time in Charters’ debut novel.
In 1849, 13-year-old Mary Boland is determined to fulfill the promise she made to her dying mother: leave the disease and despair of life in Ireland, locate her father in America, and give him the golden cross that Mary’s mother gave her. After Mary initially meets kind strangers who help her get to the coast, a devious Englishwoman tricks her onto The Pilgrim’s Dandy, a “coffin ship” aboard which half the passengers are expected to die on the trans-Atlantic trip. Onboard, the sailors brutally use and abuse Mary, her new friend Ceili, and the slave boy Kamua. Despite the atrocities they face on the voyage, Mary and Kam are able to start a new life in Boston, where Kam gets work as a deliveryboy and Mary begins working in an Irish pub (Ceili isn’t so lucky). In time, they become a traveling medicine man and a midwife, respectively. As Mary tries to learn her father’s fate and sort out her feelings for the handsome Daniel Kelly, she begins having run-ins with the dangerous and lecherous Shiv McGraw, a gangster with an iron grip on South Boston. Mary must evade Shiv’s clutches, discover the secrets of her Irish family, and protect the lives of her new Boston family as she tries to establish her new life. Charters interweaves many important topics—immigration, civil rights, women’s rights—into her exciting novel. The narrative paints an evocative portrait of South Boston in the era of Irish immigration, and the supporting characters are particularly well-represented. However, the novel struggles to find a consistent tone as it switches from scenes of rape to childish friendship to slapstick pranks without the scene-setting and worldbuilding that would make such drastic shifts make sense.
A gripping but uneven story of a young woman obtaining her independence in a new land.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62420-176-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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