A Sweet Love Story about pre-WWII New York City

North River is a warm-hearted and touching love story written about pre-WWII New York City, a doctor with a conscience, and a tough cookie – or should I say cannoli—named Rose. Dr. Jim Delaney is the son of a long-gone Tammany Hall big shot who came back from WWI emotionally scarred and physically unable to practice as the surgeon he longed to be. He returned to a bitter and angry wife named Molly and a little girl named Grace who didn’t remember him, and he has been doing his best ever since to fulfill his survival pledge by becoming a good general doctor to the teeming immigrant neighborhoods in the lower east side where he and his family live.
Fast forward a decade or more and a mentally disturbed Molly has disappeared, whether into the North River or to a new life elsewhere no one knows. Grace has grown up spoiled, willful, and seized by the fever of political change, has disappeared into Mexico where she has married a “revolutionary” and fathered a little boy. A lonely and guilt-ridden Dr. Delaney is going through his daily routine of caring for his patients, but with a frozen heart and plagued by nightmares from the war and from Molly’s ghostly visits.
One day he comes home to his 2-year-old grandson dumped on his doorstep and a note from Grace that she is off to find her husband in pre-fascist Spain. Delaney hires an Italian immigrant woman to care for little Carlito. Rose and Carlito soon thaw out Delaney’s heart and give him something to live for, and while we watch the budding relationships flower, we are treated to a picture of New York City in the icy depths of a Depression winter, filled with gangland wars, political entanglements, soup kitchens and hollow-eyes veterans of the “Great War” selling their apples on street corners or lining up at Delaney’s office for quinine for their recurring malaria fevers.
There is sweet and there is bitter-sweet in North River, and while the characters of Delaney, Rose and Carlito are occasionally a little too saccharine, and the plot a little too fairytale, this story burrows into your heart and captures you. We all need happy endings once in a while, and Hamill delivers.