Galway Bay

Galway Bay

By Mary Pat Kelly (550 pages)

Published by Grand Central

Bookish rating: 4

Galway Bay qualifies, I think, as an “epic.” Spanning about 60 years, we follow Honora Kelly, from the “before times” in Ireland during the 1840s, through the Great Starvation, across the Atlantic, and during her life in Chicago.

Kelly covers a lot of ground in 550 pages. She sets up a sparkling Irish ideal, with (a few too many) fairy or ancient stories, pipe music, green hills, and the blue Galway Bay. Then “blight” on the potato crop three times in four years combined with evil landlords and an effed up government blocking aid cause around 1 million Irish peasants die. Although difficult to read, especially as Honora narrates as a mother with starving children, the years of blight are the most compelling of Kelly’s novel.

Galway Bay is good historical fiction. Honora has a unique and believable voice, the story is steeped in thick historical context, and the writing is very good. Although not written in dialect (thank goodness—dialect always reads as forced to me), Kelly effectively conveys that lively Irish lilt in in the dialogue as well as the rest of the writing. Irish words are sprinkled throughout, blessedly with a glossary at the back of the book. Although lending a nice Irish element, the syntax (I know, how boring) is really where Kelly pulls off a believable Irish tone for the book. The language sometimes veers a little too sentimental and preachy in Honora’s internal pondering, but it’s not terrible. Just a tad distracting and a little cheesy.

Kelly falls prey to a glitch I often see in historical fiction, especially epic-type fiction: the compulsion to include every possible historical event as personally affecting the heroine. The Great Starvation and Civil War I get. But loads of Irish politics, Irish-American politics, the Chicago fire, every influential Irish person, and on and on stretched credibility. The final 150 pages or so felt like a speedy, packed , bulleted list of Important Irish-American Moments in History, and I found myself anxious to get to the last page.

Galway Bay is a long but rewarding read for those interested in Irish, Irish-American, and Chicago history. Recommended, if you’ve got the time.

Catching Fire

Catching Fire
By Suzanne Collins (391 pages)
Published by Scholastic
Bookish rating: 3.5

I don't really care for writing reviews for books like Catching Fire, the second book in the wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy. Thousands upon thousands reviews already exist; I can't add much to the conversation.

But here we are. Is Catching Fire as good as The Hunger Games? No, but it's still quite good. We meet up with our archery heroine Katniss, who finds herself wanting to start a rebellion against the Panem (futuristic North America) government as well as in a Twilight-esque love triangle with Gale and Peeta.

Like the first book, Collins excels at plotting and pacing. She raises the stakes at the exact right spots, which makes for lots of page turning. Or, well, Kindle clicking. Lots of characters come and go, and Collins at subtly highlighting those you need to remember and those who aren't so important.

Catching Fire is clearly a transition novel, capitalizing on the adrenaline of the first book and steering us to the big climax and conclusion in the third book.

If you read and enjoyed The Hunger Games, recommended.

The Off Season

The Off Season

By Catherine Gilbert Murdock (300 pages)

Published by Graphia

Bookish rating: 3.5

I wasn’t absolutely in love with Murdock’s Dairy Queen, the first book in this sporty farm girl series, and yet I found myself coming back for more D.J. Schwenk.

The Off Season picks up almost immediately where Dairy Queen left off, with D.J. playing football on the (boys’) high school team, her family’s dairy farm facing major economic strife, her boyfriend who happens to be QB for her school’s rival team, and her family that can’t communicate worth cow poo. (The family dynamics—especially between D.J. and her remarkably-complex-for-a-YA-novel dad—remain the strongest part of this book.)

First, D.J. effs up her shoulder, requiring her to choose between finishing the football season or being healed enough to play basketball, when the latter can almost definitely ensure her a college scholarship (and her folks are broke). Then her brother, who plays college ball for the University of Washington, gets a major spinal cord injury during a game. She hops a plane to Seattle to care for him, and frankly, much of this part of the book seems eerily similar to Season 1 of Friday Night Lights. Just saying.

A few quibbles. First, whether D.J. and her fam live in Wisconsin or not, I cannot imagine them all referring to UW (that is, “U-Dub”) as “the University of Washington” or even “Washington” among themselves and to each other, especially if their son or brother is second QB for UW. If you have spent more than 14 seconds in the Pacific Northwest, you know it’s U-Dub. So, that whole UW aspect just didn’t ring true to me.

Second, if we have to hear all about Wisconsin, a little detail on Seattle—since D.J. travels there—would’ve been nice. Was it drizzly? Anything? There was no sense of PLACE when she was in Seattle, unlike every other location she jumps around to.

Last, my biggest quibble is the same I had with the first book—oh, those interminable internal monologues that go on for pages and pages. Murdock can cover 4 or 5 events with nary a line of dialogue, which makes for the temptation to SKIM. I get that she’s trying to give us D.J.’s “voice” and all, but lordy. And speaking of voice, countless reviews rave about D.J.’s unique, fantastic, oh so witty voice, but I’m not crazy about it. Her tone comes across as too young and naïve—too “well, shucks” or something. Honestly, it sounds like a grown-up trying to write “young and insecure,” but maybe I’m just cranky or something.

Despite that my “quibbles” section takes up more space than anything else in this review, I actually did like the book. The family farm stress paired with the football is refreshing for YA literature (though the book could’ve used a lot more football). And, despite her sounding too young and written by the heavy hand of a Grown-Up, I do find D.J. Schwenk endearing, perceptive, and ultimately a character that I—and, more importantly, adolescent girls—can root for. What the heck, recommended.

When Washington Was in Vogue

When Washington Was in Vogue

By Edward Christopher Williams (285 pages)

Published by Amistad

Bookish rating: 3.5

When Washington Was in Vogue is one of those tricky books to review, because it has a lot of value but turned out to be a bit of a chore to get through.

The book is “a lost novel of the Harlem Renaissance,” which means it was found as published in The Messenger from January 1925 through June 1926, as an English PhD student, Adam McKible, was doing research for his dissertation. Certainly, there is a special “discovery” element that, frankly, is so often absent from literary research. I mean, it’s hard to compare with discovering new fossils, miracle drugs, or planets, such as in the sciences.

So when English nerds discover something, it’s pretty exciting.

The novel is a simple love story, told through letters via Davy Carr’s narration. Well read, well educated, and quite contemplative, Davy has an opinion on pretty much everything. As a piece of historical writing, this is useful for revealing some fascinating nuances, habits, fashions, manners, and dynamics of Washington, DC, and the DC “Black Bourgeoisie” of the 1920s. Also, as someone pretty familiar with DC, having lived there for awhile, Davy's descriptions of areas almost a century ago were eerily fascinating.

This is, of course, a novel of the Harlem Renaisssance, but Davy’s criticism of racism is surprisingly understated. For example, he writes to his friend Bob, “The downtown theaters here segregate colored people, and some of them will not sell them seats anywhere but in the gallery. Naturally, that lets me out. You will say, of course, that since I can ‘get by,’ such a rule should not bother me. But for some reason difficult to explain, it does” (p. 15). The reason it bugs him seems pretty clear to me!

More interestingly, Davy criticizes how folks—women in particular—who are light-skinned enough to “pass” not only do so (and really, who could blame them?), but leverage it against other Black women. Davy describes a shocking scene in which some light-skinned women who can pass and thus attend certain theatrical events that are absolutely closed to Black people, chat among themselves, asking a dark-skinned woman her opinion of such performances, knowing perfectly well that she cannot attend them. Davy, livid, views what he calls “the color line” among the Black bourgeoisie that places higher  value on lighter skin as “a dreadful confession of admitted interiority” (p. 75).

When Washington Was in Vogue has a lot of charm and tremendous historical value. It is, however, not literarily fantastic or amazing. Descriptions get long-winded and tiresome, and Davy can be a tad stuffy and unlikable at times. Although it’s a nice book, and most definitely an asset to furthering understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, ultimately, from a strictly literary point of view, it’s just a nice little love story.