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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This remarkably accomplished and ambitious first novel, by the chief speechwriter at Time Warner, is a historical saga set in a New York that is as vividly realized for its period (the Civil War) as Bonfire of the Vanities was for the 1980s. It also has much the same narrative drive and broad range of characters, and is as grandly cynical about most human activities. It follows a motley group of New Yorkers through a few days in the terrible summer of 1863, when anguish at the dragging war, the boiling rancor between the invading Irish immigrants and ``True Americans,'' the hatred of both for the blacks they feared would take away their jobs, the festering resentment of the poor against the new rich, and the all-embracing new draft laws combined to set the city ablaze. The Draft Riots form an unforgettable climax, but the book never lags for a moment on its grinding progress toward apocalypse. We see an Irish con man at his work; a young actor who is an early minstrel star (audiences laugh at minstrels and weep at Uncle Tom's Cabin even as their behavior to the black people among them is appalling); a beautiful young mulatto woman making her delicate, dangerous way through life; a child runaway who becomes a successful broker, only to face losing his fortune if he bets wrong on which side will be victorious in the war; and poor Stephen Foster, his songs on everyone's lips but reduced to plundering what little is left of his talent to pay for the oblivion of drink. It is a vast, compelling panoply of human misery and greed, with a keen sense of how New York looked, felt and smelled 130 years ago. Quinn's is the best kind of historical novel, providing both the compelling detail and the broad understanding that makes a past age both believable and comprehensible. 50,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo; BOMC selection. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
In a sprawling debut, Quinn, chief speechwriter for Time Warner, pays long, lusty tribute to his Irish-American heritage and his hometown, New York City, while exploring one of the darker moments in the city's history--the bloody Draft Riots of 1863. Jimmy Dunne is a young thief with a taste for whiskey and a knack for finding himself in the thick of things; Jack Mulcahey is a prominent black-face player in the minstrel shows, in love with the light-skinned black actress Eliza; Charles Bedford is a rags- to-riches Wall Street trader whose firm is about to collapse from bad investments and his gambling debts; Margaret O'Driscoll is his comely maid; the composer Stephen Foster is bereft of his muse and perpetually drunk. Along with a host of others, all of these people are swept up in a tide of racial strife as Irish battle blacks for jobs and living space, while the grim specter of conscription grips New York. Dunne, put on Bedford's trail by a would-be blackmailer, instead is smitten when he meets fair Margaret. In a parallel development, Jack considers marrying Eliza, but as tensions reach a flashpoint in the first days of the draft, the city erupts in fire and death. Bedford escapes after killing his blackmailer, and Dunne saves Margaret from a howling mob, but Jack loses Eliza when he fails to keep their young charge, the mixed-blood Squirt, from being castrated and lynched. Meanwhile, Foster, alternately despondent and exhilarated in the chaos, finally does himself in. Full of melodramatic turns and insistently benevolent views of Irish excess, but a spirited tale of city demographics in painful transition, with its vitality generally compensating for an otherwise loosely threaded patchwork of adventures. (First printing of 50,000)
Booklist Review
Certainly Quinn's setting, the New York draft riots of 1863, is surrounded with compelling subjects--racial tensions, animosity between immigrants and nationals, urbanization, and the Civil War. Any one of those could sustain a novel, but the difficulty with this valiant debut effort is that Quinn goes after everything and never really focuses his narrative. He relates the life of a dozen or so citizens, mixing in flashbacks, taking the reader to the point when violence flashes and Irish mobs start lynching blacks. Yet Quinn also distracts the reader by creating one character after another without convincingly linking them. The result is a series of vignettes, including those of a clever criminal (the best drawn one), a stockbroker, an Irish domestic, minstrels in blackface, musician Stephen Foster down on his luck, etc. Quinn seemingly is attempting a period Bonfire of the Vanities, but his principal success is in his presentation of a wealth of contemporary detail (an information hoard useful in Quinn's day job, as a speechwriter for governors and Time Warner). Readers drawn more to history than character and story may warm to Banished Children. ~--Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
Set in New York City during the Civil War years, this first novel echoes with Stephen Foster songs and the disparate voices of its teeming throngs of citizens while focusing on the experience of Irish Catholic immigrants. Quinn offers a strong, imaginative, and well-researched examination of the life of common people in that time through portraits of hucksters, minstrel actors, speculators, soldiers, and domestic servants whose lives touch. Their stories, set against a background of emigration, war, gangs, racism, stock exchange crashes, shanty towns, draft resistance, prostitution, strikes, and the manipulation of the uneducated masses to embrace a national interest, suggest that characterization of any past as ``the good old days'' is always a matter of who's doing the talking. Thoroughly enjoyable, educational, and highly recommended for fiction collections.-- Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
