KITTY'S PEOPLE
by Susan Barrett Price
A biographical novel combines a family history and an immense tapestry of oral histories, focusing on a beloved grandmother.
In Chicago in November 1885, Maggie Keville meets Moses Flanagan in a streetcar on the way to work. Both are Irish immigrants in the American Midwest with hopes of a better future pinned on them by the families they left behind. Maggie and Moses are the parents of the main character, Kitty Flanagan, Barrett Price’s grandmother. Kitty’s beginnings are beautifully told in Maggie and Moses’ love story before the protagonist takes center stage. Kitty is born in 1890 and lives through an era of great change: the turn of the 20th century, World War I, and the Depression. The period details in the novel are elaborate (“Sunday is unseasonably warm. Kitty decides to wear her plaid taffeta skirt with a frilly shirtwaist, a fitted bodice, and her high-top shoes with the medium heel. Her stylish felt chapeau sports a hatband with a couple of long pheasant feathers”). But the author never loses the narrative flair that comes with the convincing dialogue and characterizations she has imagined and woven together. It is a sweeping story covering a half century that has, at its core, a search for stability and a woman who desires nothing more than to keep her family safe and together. Perhaps most poignant is Kitty’s relationship with her younger brother, Modie, who falls in with the wrong crowd, shedding a light on the criminal culture of early-20th-century Chicago and St. Louis. The tale is peppered with loss and heartbreak, but it also shines with joy and humor at times as well as spotlighting the lot of women in that era: in particular, issues surrounding reproductive health and abortion. Despite her strong connection to the main character, Barrett Price seldom slips into sentimentality. In the author’s engaging story, Kitty is indisputably a three-dimensional hero, with both strengths and flaws that make her thoroughly realistic.
A well-crafted family tale that will enthrall readers interested in the early 20th century.