An often engaging melodrama in which characters struggle to maintain their dignity while pursuing the elusive American dream.
The hardscrabble lives of an immigrant family intersect with those of the extremely wealthy in this historical novel set in the steel mills and coal mines of Western Pennsylvania in Pasterick’s debut novel.
The author introduces her book’s main characters individually in short, third-person narratives set on a single day in May 1910. Janos and Karina Kovac are Eastern European immigrants who still struggle to survive after a decade of backbreaking work in seedy Riverton, Pennsylvania. He works at a steel mill for 12 hours each day; she was recently hired as a housekeeper by one of the mill’s managers. Karina’s willingness to provide sexual favors to Henry Archer, her bachelor employer, has made her confident that her job is secure. Unlike Janos, she’s a detached, indifferent parent to their two young children, Sofie and Lukas. A tragic accident at the mill coincides with Karina’s discovery that Henry will be leaving Riverton in a month, initiating a momentous series of events. These culminate in an unsolved murder; the abrupt disappearance of several people, including Karina; and the loss of young Lukas’ leg. The story then skips ahead seven years, and the Kovac family has moved on and achieved a measure of comfort, but a hurricane threatens this calm, and a horrific coal mining accident affects a dear friend. The novel’s structure presents many short chapters from different points of view, giving energy to the complex exposition, which addresses such topics as mental illness, infertility, rape, and postpartum depression. The larger community deals with unsafe workplaces, anti-union violence, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Two industrial accidents, both resulting from poor management and avarice, are described in chilling detail; one is in the steel mill, as “a ladle carrying a hundred tons of molten metal crashed to the ground...sending splatters of fiery liquid twenty-five feet in every direction.” The other is a coal mine collapse that kills several and traps others underground. Some narrative flourishes feel overplayed, however, as when a bereft woman banishes the color red from her house after suffering a miscarriage.
An often engaging melodrama in which characters struggle to maintain their dignity while pursuing the elusive American dream.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-191-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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