A story of grit and perseverance that will appeal to readers interested in the history of women in journalism.
A historical novel about the 10 days that famed newspaper journalist Nellie Bly posed as a patient in a mental hospital.
The story opens in 1919 as narrator Beatrice Alexander performs menial tasks as Bly’s assistant at the McAlpin Hotel in Manhattan. Now in her 50s, Bly maintains a makeshift office in a suite at the hotel, where she writes articles and arranges adoptions. She gives Beatrice some handwritten notes to type—pages that recount Bly’s undercover stint in a mental institution decades before. As Beatrice works through these notes, third-person narration takes readers 30 years into the past. Desperate for her first break as a journalist, young Bly found work at a newspaper by agreeing to do an exposé on a women’s asylum. After convincing medical professionals that she was mentally unstable, she was taken to Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for Women, in the East River, where she was instantly subjected to miserable treatment. The conditions at Blackwell’s Island couldn’t have been worse, with its rancid food, “filthy bathwater,” and abusive medical staff. Bly found only one genuinely altruistic doctor there, and his efforts had minimal impact on patient conditions. As Bly waited for her publisher to rescue her from the asylum, she worried that her suffering might cause her to lose her grip on reality. Novelist Braithwaite (The Road to Newgate, 2018, etc.) delivers a well-researched and engrossing tale that focuses on female empowerment. It’s full of intriguing historical details about past medical practices and the abuses that wards of the state endured; it also features many real-life characters, including patients and doctors that Bly met in the asylum. Indeed, the scenes in the so-called “madhouse” are significantly more compelling than those set years later, but the latter-day happenings do serve to show how successful Bly became after her first assignment. Although readers know from the start that Bly escaped Blackwell’s Island, the descriptions of her harrowing experiences remain captivating.
A story of grit and perseverance that will appeal to readers interested in the history of women in journalism.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79893-638-2
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Crooked Cat Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
