Bakewell (Will’s War, 2010, etc.) offers a historical novel about a textile strike that’s part love story, part crime novel and part period piece.
It’s January 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the city’s Italian immigrant textile workers have gone on strike. Police inspector Amos Flanagan is worried about the safety of his 19-year-old son, Paddy, a supervisor in one of the mills. But Paddy’s not the one who’s in danger. One evening, after the factory owners resort to hosing down the picketers, Paddy finds an Italian girl nearly frozen to death on the pavement. He carries her home to his mother and immediately falls in love. To him, Maria Petrella is “like something out of [the] Arabian Nights, all eyes, with a figure and grace of movement calculated to destroy his brain.” Because her father objects to an Irish suitor, however, the two young people begin meeting in secret. In the meantime, the leading mill owner wants Amos, who has friends in the Italian community, to find out what the strikers are planning. Soon after, the police get a tip about a cache of dynamite that the strikers may be intending to use to blow up the mills, but Amos suspects the explosives were planted. This novel keeps a fast pace as it alternates between its two main plotlines. Some readers may have trouble following the action, however, because of a maze of other subplots: Amos is also trying to save a boy from his abusive father, settle a case of “bastardy,” and decide whether to comply with his father-in-law’s request that he quit the force and move to Boston to run the family trucking business. In addition, Maria’s parents move back to Italy, taking her with them. Many of the characters are underdeveloped and broadly drawn, but Bakewell does make sure that major real-life figures involved in the strike get at least a mention, including Joseph Ettor, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, and Arturo Giovannitti of the Italian Socialist Federation. Readers who stick with the complex story will be rewarded by a happy ending.
A historical novel that’s long on plot but short on character.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0971870185
Page Count: 310
Publisher: UNABOOKS
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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