Serious-minded yet eminently readable historical fiction handily done.
Based on real events, this novel offers a sweeping view of politics in rural Ireland in the turbulent 1870s, focusing specifically on activist Michael Davitt and his role in the class struggle known as the Land War.
Michael Davitt has just been released from seven and a half years at Dartmoor prison, paroled from his 15-year term for felony treason against the British Crown. Although quiet and cautious from his years of solitary confinement, he is by no means chastened; straightaway he resumes his role as an agitator for chipping away at “landlordism,” the vestigial feudal system that persists in Ireland. Potato crops are failing, rents are rising, and the starving poor are being turned out of their homes just as they were during the famine of the 1840s. Davitt, everyone agrees, has the visibility and passion to help right these wrongs. Keady (The Dowry, 2006) enlivens his story with a cast of memorable characters: Mary Duddy, the housewife evicted from her land; Father O’Malley, the parish priest who must balance his love of country and commitment to the poor with his sworn allegiance to Rome; Lord Lucan, the malevolent aristocrat known as the “Old Exterminator,” and his unctuous Scottish land agent, MacAlister; Bicko, the ambivalent spy; and visionary parliamentarian Charles Stewart Parnell. The extent to which characters other than Davitt and Parnell are based on real people isn’t exactly clear, but either way, the author has laudably made them believable and engaging. Readers will find themselves fretting over what will become of Mary Duddy and her family, mentally hissing whenever MacAlister appears on the pages and rooting for Davitt to win in politics as well as love. Dealing with material that might easily become either ponderous or strident, Keady writes liltingly, with dialogue that rings true whether it’s the vernacular of Irish farmers or the measured politesse of the duchess of Marlborough. The book ends with some successes, some lingering complications and less than a third of Davitt’s life story told—a tantalizing hint, perhaps, of a sequel or two in the works.
Serious-minded yet eminently readable historical fiction handily done.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4751-9082-3
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Castletree Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.
A fictional biography of one of North Carolina’s first female African American real estate entrepreneurs.
Josephine Leary’s home life is at the center of this novel, while her real estate investment business is conducted mainly offstage. The main conflict is with her husband, Archer, aka Sweety, making for a somewhat pedestrian tale of occasional domestic strife. Although he seemed to appreciate Jo’s business acumen before they married, Sweety needles her about her work outside the home, which is, at first, mainly in their family business, a barbershop in Edenton, North Carolina. Sweety resents the fact that Jo has her own money—derived from income properties she began buying with a wedding gift of $500 from her father, a White former Confederate officer—and when she spends it on their family, for example buying a new buggy, buying their rental house, and buying their barbershop, he feels shamed as a man. Which does not prevent him, as Josephine’s first-person narration reminds us often, from splurging on expensive whisky. Jo, her grandmother, mother, and brother were all formerly enslaved on plantations in North Carolina. Now (the narrative spans the 1870s to the early 1890s), they are all doing well in Edenton, a prosperous community that appears relatively free of racial strife. Jo is never fazed by the racism she does encounter, not to mention the sexism. A White seller refuses to deal with her on her first property purchase, until "his greed outweighs his prejudice." She dismisses racial slurs by White women as a product of poor upbringing. The worst racist aggression—three drunken former Confederates disrupt church Juneteenth festivities with a wagonload of rotten tomatoes—is investigated by the local sheriff only at the behest of Sweety, who passes for White. Although Jo’s achievements are certainly worthy of being celebrated, her relatively obstacle-free path to prosperity, as well as her fictional doppelgänger’s total lack of vulnerability, saps the narrative of tension. We’re left with a pleasant panorama of middle-class small-town life in the late 19th century.
A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-6368-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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