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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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