By the Rivers of Brooklyn (Book Review)

By the Rivers of Brooklyn by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole is a fascinating and ambitious novel that follows the lives of six women through most of the Twentieth Century as they travel from Newfoundland to Brooklyn and back.

You need to understand — I read this book as a PDF, mostly on the tiny, backlit screen of my iPhone. So if I was to find magic, the book had to overcome huge limitations.

But find magic I did. I was enchanted by the very title of the prologue: “Items Not Found in a Trunk in Anne Parson’s Attic.” I was charmed that the author put the focus on what is not there. Then I met Anne herself, a girl who searches her home for hidden staircases and musty attics, and I was well and truly hooked. Always, always, it’s the people.

From the prologue, Rivers of Brooklyn moves back in time to three women in 1924: Rose, the proverbial black sheep of the Evans family, who cannot wait to move to New York where she can bob her hair, wear short skirts, and smoke cigarettes; Annie, the daughter who stays home, content to care for the aging Evans parents; and Ethel, who moves to New York to be with the Evans boy she’s been dating forever. None of the girls get exactly what they expect.

I did have one tiny gripe about the book. By the third generation, I had trouble keeping the characters straight. Each chapter is from the point of view of one of the women — six in all. Toward the end, I’d turn to a new chapter and think to myself, “Now is Anne Claire’s daughter, or Diane’s? Is she the one descended from the fruit seller?” It was a little confusing.

Then I turned the last page and found a family tree, which cleared everything up. If you hate spoilers, don’t look at it until you reach the third generation (I didn’t confuse the first two). But if you need it, it’s there. And it negates the only criticism I might have made, especially since Morgan-Cole thoughtfully insisted it be in the back of the book, where it won’t be seen unless the reader goes looking for spoilers. 

What makes this book so powerful is the characters: all the women are deeply flawed but generally good people, muddling through the best they can, just like the rest of us. They have to make terrible decisions, and then they have to live with the decisions they’ve made.

I remember Morgan-Cole saying once (sorry, I can’t remember the context) that all of her books ultimately deal with redemption. In Rivers of Brooklyn, that theme is especially powerful because some of these characters maybe don’t “deserve” to be redeemed.

Think about that. Take a person who is mostly a good person but who makes a few mistakes (someone like you). Redemption for that person is great, but it’s not startling. Take someone else, someone who is selfish and cruel, who uses people without hesitation, who throws away her own life (and the lives of others) for shallow reasons. Redemption for someone like this really IS “amazing grace,” a true miracle.

Good historical fiction transports the reader to another time and place, and Rivers of Brooklyn does that well too. Morgan-Cole is nothing if not thorough with her research (I suspect she’s a little OCD about it, in fact, and if she weren’t a good friend, I’d say so).

But it’s the history itself I found fascinating here. In her blog, Morgan-Cole says that at one point 75,000 Newfoundlanders lived in Brooklyn (including some of her ancestors). She says,

“They are remembered here, of course — whenever I tell people I’ve written a novel about Newfoundlanders in Brooklyn they tell me stories about an uncle or grandmother or father who went there, maybe died there. 

Then she adds  a second thought, one that brings my point into crisp relief.

In Brooklyn they have disappeared without a trace, forgotten in that borough of immigrant communities who came and put down roots during the early years of the 20th century.”

 It’s astonishing to me that an entire population of people can translocate en masse and then, at some later point, translocate back, leaving barely a trace. And it’s even more astonishing that the twin migrations are remembered elsewhere. I think this phenomenon might be the direct result of something that makes Newfoundland special.

In Rivers of Brooklyn, Morgan-Cole writes, “Heaven is a July day in St. Johns, warm but not sultry.” And yes, she’s talking about Heaven with a capital “H.” It’s not a metaphor.

And yet, perhaps it is. 

I blogged two weeks ago on Happy Endings about the last word in a novel, and how it relates to the inner need of the POV character(s). Morgan-Cole commented to say that the last word in Rivers of Brooklyn is “home,” a word that is “perfect in every way.”

And indeed it is. Newfoundland remains “home” to these characters, even the ones who were born and raised in New York and have never been to the island. It remains the place they long for, and ultimately the place where most of them end up.

I’ve never been to Newfoundland, but I’m fascinated by it. It’s one of those places I must go before I die, and I felt this way before I met Morgan-Cole. In fact, I know many people fascinated by the magic of Newfoundland. But I’ve never known exactly what the magic is.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this. Newfoundland has managed to keep its children home, in a heart-sense if not a literal sense. Perhaps what we find enthralling about this mystical place is that it represents home, the kind of home the rest of us have lost in our disposable, mobile society. The kind of place to which we long to return.

And maybe that’s the truest redemption of all, the ultimate grace: to have a place where when you have go there, they have to take you in.

Tags: By the Rivers of Brooklyn, Trudy J. Morgan-Cole