Review: City of Hope: A Novel, by Kate Kerrigan

CITY OF HOPE

by Kate Kerrigan

William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (June 25, 2013)

Paperback, 352 pages

978-0062237286
$14.99

CITY OF HOPE, the sequel to Ellis Island, begins in Ireland in 1934.  It has been over ten years since Ellie returned from America with enough money to pay for her husband John’s leg surgery. Today, John works on the farm his parents own, and Ellie owns a successful business in town. They yearn for a child, although she has failed to carry to term. She arrives home one day to discover John slumped over a chair, having died of a heart attack.

Ellie spirals into inconsolable grief, refusing comfort from everyone.  After the customary Irish wake and funeral passes, denial and hopelessness pervade her thoughts, and she makes the sudden decision to return to America.  She leaves her business and family behind as she seeks solace in her past. After arriving in New York, she questions her purpose in life until one day she meets Maureen, a homeless woman with children. Once again, an entrepreneurial challenge sets in motion a plan that has unexpected results.

CITY OF HOPE is a lovely story that captures the essence of the 1930s.  The author weaves her story around the social issues of that time: labor strikes, homelessness, poverty, joblessness, and the plight of single women. Ellie Hogan is a strong female character, but the author doesn’t make her sympathetic enough.  However, two lesser characters emerge who will delight the reader: Sheila, a somewhat eccentric and shallow woman out to catch a man, and Bridie, a steadfast mother figure who Ellie comes to depend on.

Readers with an affinity for generational epics and historical fiction will enjoy both Ellis Island and CITY OF HOPE, with a promise of book three to come.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from HNR to write a candid review for publication. 

© [Wisteria Leigh] and [Bookworm's Dinner], [2008-2013]. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to [Wisteria Leigh] and [Bookworm's Dinner] with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Originally published in HNR periodical, Issue 65 (August 2013).

Review: A Hundred Summers, by Beatriz Williams

Personal Thoughts......

The setting of A Hundred Summers takes place in and around Watch Hill, Rhode Island.  As a child I vacationed along this same stretch of beach with my family each summer.   Later, my parents moved to Misquamicut to be close to the shoreline.   However,  the visions of "38", and it's aftermath were still vivid to them. They were 10 years old when the hurricane hit.  They decided that they wanted to be at least 3 blocks from shore. They never regretted a day spent near the Atlantic beaches.

I consider myself very lucky to have experienced life along the Misquamicut shores. Memories are cherished of that time.  If you have never had authentic Fish and Chips, or clam cakes, then head to Rhode Island sometime soon.  Yum! Yum!

I was often told stories of the 1938 Hurricane that decimated the South County shores of Rhode Island.  In fact, my Great Aunt had a cottage there.  When the storm hit, the winds, rain and storm surge was so violent, parts of her home's foundation were found blocks away.   Only a few homes were left standing. Over the years, time wipes away memory and cottages and businesses have emerged along the Atlantic shores.  If you ever doubted the expression  that history repeats itself, than the tempest of last October, 2013 known as Hurricane Sandy was confirmation, and a rapacious reminder.

Here is a You Tube video filmed in September 2012 by CBS Chennel 5, Boston,  on the 75th anniversary of the 38 Hurricane.

For me, the cautious words of my parents haunted me as the visions of Hurricane Sandy smashed into the coastline once again with equal velocity.

Review: Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

CASCADE

Maryanne O'Hara
Viking 2012
ISBN 9780670026029
Hardback,  378 pages
$26.95






It is 1935, the country is in the chokehold of the Great Depression, and Desdemona Hart would do just about anything to help her father. William Hart, actor and owner of the Cascade Shakespeare Theater, is in failing health and close to bankruptcy. With her tuition unpaid, she must return home to Cascade, Massachusetts, leaving her budding career as an artist behind. She marries Asa Spaulding in order to provide stability and shelter for her father.

Desdemona appears to settle for a less-than-perfect marriage. She honestly cares for Asa, but his desire to start a family immediately makes her shudder, and so she secretly tracks her fertile ovulation days each morning. Even though William Hart adores his daughter, he reveals that he changed his will to make Asa the beneficiary of his theater. To make matters worse, legislation may pass to allow Cascade to be flooded to create a reservoir. Dez then meets Jacob Solomon, a talented artist who sparks an instantaneous allure that is almost too great to ignore.

Dez is a conflicted character who faces life-changing decisions. Her situation is complex, and her choices are anything but straightforward. Jacob Solomon is Jewish, and the reader becomes a witness to the hostile prejudice that often impinges on innocent lives. The author also deftly looks at the social norms of this time period. Women’s rights and expectations regarding marriage, divorce, children, birth control and property rights were vastly different 80 years ago. CASCADE  is an insightful, sensitive, and important novel of our social history which reads with clarity and authenticity. Maryanne O’Hara shares the difficult, limited freedom and choices that women were raised to accept but which they frequently challenged. 


July, 2012
Wisteria Leigh





Disclosure:
I was sent a free copy of this book from HNR for review and publication. The review is submitted without bias. 

This review originally appeared in Historical Novels Society Issue 61, August 2012. 
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/cascade/

© [Wisteria Leigh] and [Bookworm's Dinner], [2008-2013].

Review-Bloodroot, by Amy Greene

BLOODROOT
Amy Greene, Alfred A. Knopf, Dutton, March 2008, $25.95,HC,464pp, 978-0-525-95054-7.

Byrdie Lamb was said to be one of those witches from Chickweed Holler, one who as they say had “the touch”. She gave birth to five children and buried four. Her last child Clio has a wandering, adventurous spirit and is not happy staying at home with Byrdie, so it comes as no surprise when she runs away to get married. One day Clio and her husband are killed, leaving behind her daughter Myra. Byrdie’s relationship with Clio was never close, but she is devoted to Myra. They live together on Bloodroot Mountain, an inseparable pair. Brydie shares her ways with her, all is good until John Odom catches Myra's eye. Like her mama before her, Myra leaves Bloodroot Mountain to get married.

At this point, the reader picks up the story from Myra’s children’s point of view. They are twins, a son and a daughter. Myra’s life unfolds in Greene’s intricate, multi-layered story that holds together like a carefully laid mosaic. Byrdie, Doug, John Odom, Laura Odom Blevins, and finally Myra share a piece of the tale adding dimensions from their memories of the past as the truth is revealed through them. The expressive, tangible characters and breath with a hint of Appalachia in their souls. The story takes place from 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression through today.

The pain of the characters,breathtakingly warm and genuine, will penetrate deep into your heart. Greene’s story about family, forgiveness and healing, is summarized beautifully in her words, “It’s not forgetting that heals. It’s remembering.”

Although told with a smooth measured cadence the story moves with unstoppable momentum. Sobbing as the final pages were read, I sat motionless, deep in thought with the opened book on my lap. A poignant debut with emotional depth.

Disclosure: This ARC was sent to me for review from Historical Novels Review.
Original review published in Historical Novels Review, Issue 52, May 2010 as an Editor's Choice.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, a True-Life Novel

Half Broke Horses
A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner
October 2009, 272 p.
978-1-4165-86289





Walls is shaping up to be one of this decades most fascinating storytellers. The adventures of her family in The Glass Castle were mesmerizing and truly an unforgettable read. With a pen that glows with brilliance, her writing in Half Broke Horses is bedazzling. In her words, this is the true life novel of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith who died when she was eight. Half Broke Horses portrays her grandmother’s life told through all of the many stories she heard as a child.

The novel is told in first person from the point of view of her grandmother. The opening chapter begins, “Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” However, no matter what trouble faced Lily Casey Smith, she would have the intelligence, the determination, the answers and always the faith in herself that she would survive.

As the story opens, faced with the onslaught of a flash-flood, Lily has presence of mind to gather her two siblings together and hoists them into a cottonwood tree, where they hang on precariously during a harrowing overnight until the morning. Lily is ten and when her mother sees her three children coming home the following morning, she praises the Lord, the guardian angels and her constant prayer for saving the three.

Lily is perturbed and says to her dad, “There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad.” She knows their survival had nothing to do with prayer and she is quick to explain it was her vigilant fight to save her brother and sister that kept them alive. Lily is a realist, and she believes there was no guardian Angel up in that tree. It was Lily Casey Smith, one tough kid, who was up in the tree making the right decisions.

One other time early in the book, Walls relates a story about her grandmother, when she was fifteen and accepts a job as a teacher. Lily has no degree in teaching, but has enough education to satisfy the school district’s needs. The town is over five hundred miles away, but Lily needs a job. Lily must make the journey on her horse Patches to Red Lake, Arizona, by herself and so she sets out on her trip with a fearless, spunky spirit of adventure.

Walls novel is a touching honest portrait of an idiosyncratically warm and loving grandmother, mother and wife who was raised on the wild side of nature. She was in my opinion “a hoot”. You will love this woman and come to understand that there is absolutely nothing in life that could stand in her way when she sets her mind to it.

Half Broke Horses is an inspirational memoir, and true life-novel that will make you chuckle, weep and simply savor like a warm cup of tea. The greatest challenge in this book I found was not being able to put it down. With my predilection for Jeannette Walls’ writing I eagerly anticipate future releases as my cup of tea is getting cold.