I get why it made a lot of lists

I really liked this one when I started it. I was so into this book. I was also listening to a podcast about Pauline Sabin (a woman credited as a major force in repealing prohibition) so digging into a little story about organized crime and booze smuggling in the Depression was right in my sweet spot. Then it jumps forward in time and the focus is on his daughter and her working in the war industry during WWII and that was so cool too and then … then the book just lost me somewhere. Not sure where. I finished it out of duty more than anything.

Oh, there’s a spoiler at the end of my review.

This is a character-driven novel, about people, not events. We start with Eddie Kerrigan, a theater man fallen on Depression hard times who opens a relationship with DexterStyles, a man clearly implied to be a higher up in a gangster racket. He has a wife and two daughters, the younger of whom was born with a severe disability that has kept her house-bound and requires around the clock care. His elder daughter, Anna, wants nothing more than to be attached to his hip.

Flash forward some fifteen years – the US is now in the throes of World War II. Eddie is gone, disappeared one day without a trace. Anna supports her mother and sister with a naval yards warehouse job, one of the many that suddenly became available to women as the men left for war. One a rare night out with a friend, she runs into Dexter, who she met as a child but who does not recognize her. It’s an intersecting story of crime, family, gender roles, and operating on both sides of the law.

SPOILER: Anna winds up preggo with Dexter’s kid and OF COURSE backs out of the word-never-used abortion and has and raises the thing. Because that’s the logical course of action for an unmarried young woman in the 1940s. And it’s at the very end of the book when it had, like, zero plot value. Ugh. C’mon, writers, let the ladies end pregnancies. It’s OKAY.

Anyway. I enjoyed the writing more than the story. The bits about Anna trying to become a naval yard diver were endlessly fascinating, especially to read about the intensity of the gear at the time. I just wasn’t wowed.