YANKEELAND

In Fewer’s historical novel, an Irish family contends with the difficulties of immigration, early-20th-century medical misogyny, and broken dreams.

Brigid Kelly was once a lively, self-confident child who relished tending to her younger siblings in the small Irish town of Moling. But in 1892, when Brigid was 6 years old, the birth of Thomas, the family’s fourth child, brought about the tragic death of Brigid’s mother (“all light had been sucked from their warm, loving home and replaced with individual struggles to exist”). Five years later, Brigid’s father Patrick buckles to social pressure and marries Agnes O’Brien, a stern woman who rules the house and the children with an iron fist. Brigid, desiring a life larger than is available in their little village, decides she must find a way to leave. Opportunity comes in the form of Ben McCarthy, a local lad who shares Brigid’s aspirations of starting over in America. The two marry in 1908, and, with Brigid’s brother James in tow, they sail to New York. Brigid and Ben settle in Niagara Falls while James plants his roots in San Francisco. When Brigid becomes involved with a group of spiritualists, free thinkers, and suffragettes, she is shunned by the church, and the resulting loss of social position causes Ben to lose his job. The author alternates between stories of the siblings left in Ireland and those of the three immigrants, but it is Brigid’s painful tale of hope, determination, and an eventual mental unraveling that drives the narrative. The strongest of the four Kelly children, she is undone by a series of tragedies that are exacerbated by the era’s accepted medical mistreatment by a misogynistic doctor. With a sharp eye for detail, Fewer treats her readers to enjoyably lavish depictions of upper-class travel across the Atlantic and a portrait of San Francisco’s bustling rebirth after the famous earthquake; she applies the same meticulous attention to the frightening isolation of Brigid’s life in a mental institution.

A piercing and infuriating tale that brings to light a historical cruelty too often kept secret.