A MOMENT OF FIREFLIES

A young boy in Depression-era Chicago deals with family turmoil, including an alcoholic father with a dark secret, in this debut novel.

David Callahan has spent a good deal of time walking the wintry streets of his neighborhood recently, as his mother orders him outside whenever his father comes home. Michael Callahan is a freight conductor for a railroad, and he drinks heavily, resulting in late-night rages that terrify David and his younger sister, Meggy. His mother gets David out of the house to protect him, but the bleak Chicago streets in 1934 are full of their own heartache and despair. Additionally, Meggy is sick and was possibly exposed to tuberculosis by a neighbor girl. Michael unfairly blames David for Meggy’s illness, and it isn’t long before the drunken man becomes violent toward his son. “It’s not me, it’s the times that make him so angry,” David tells himself, but he is also concerned about Meggy, who is housebound and desperate to go to the movies. He decides to build a wagon for her. Meanwhile, the hung-over Michael stumbles on a funeral for a boy that brings back memories of his own childhood in Ireland and the painful secret that drives his unending rage. McCluskey’s concise novel tackles heavy subject matter with a somewhat light touch, deftly using spare language in an evocative way. The close-knit world of this South Side Irish community is David’s entire universe, and the author’s choice to develop just a few key occurrences works very well as the family takes tiny steps toward absolution or at least something like peace. Flashbacks and scenes of strife are told in a dynamic, stream-of-consciousness flow, which nicely captures the effort to get to the root of the family’s pain.

A lean, astute story about a family searching for hope during hard times.