Lamar Public Library

We first glimpse Marie Commeford as a child: a girl in thick glasses, observing her pre-Depression world from a Brooklyn stoop. An innocuous encounter with a young neighbor named Pegeen establishes the bittersweet refrain of this sometimes darkly humorous novel. Pegeen calls herself an "amadan," a fool. In Marie's precise retelling of her history, everything is connected: her first heartbreak leads to her career as a funeral director's "consoling...

"For five terrifying days during the Civil War, the streets of Manhattan were taken over by the Draft Riots. ... follows three Irish women living on a small New York City street, each determined to protect herself and her family from the riots and each shouldering devastating burdens"--P. [4] of cover.

"It's wintertime in New York, and for the first time since Irish immigrant Molly Murphy started her early-twentieth-century detective agency, she is completely snowed in with work. While she's proving to be quite the entrepreneur and is very much in demand by some of Broadway's brightest stars and Fifth Avenue's richest families, she has to grudgingly admit that if she's going to work more than one case at a time, then shes going to need some help....

In a multidimensional, intricately wrought narrative, Myla Goldberg leads us back to Boston in the early part of the twentieth century and into two completely captivating worlds. One is that of Lydia, an Irish American shopgirl with bigger aspirations than your average young woman from South Boston. She seems to be well on her way to the life she has dreamed of when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin...

A young woman who had been raised in Boston marries a member of the Northwest Mounted Police and goes with him to live in the Canadian wilderness.