Land of Dreams by Kate Kerrigan

Land of Dreams by Kate Kerrigan
Published by William Morrow Paperbacks ISBN 978-0-06-234052-8
Trade paperback, $14.99

Readers first met Ellie Hogan in Kate Kerrigan's novel Ellis Island. We followed Ellie as she married the love of her life John, came to America to make money for an operation John needed, and was emotionally torn as she built a life in New York while missing her husband back home.

The second book in the trilogy, City of Hope, covered Ellie's life back home in Ireland with her husband. It was a difficult adjustment, moving back to a farm in rural Ireland after living in an exciting, vibrant city. After John's death, a grieving Ellie comes back to New York and opens a home for people who lost their homes during the Depression, eventually building an entire community.

The third book in the trilogy, set in 1942, is Land of Dreams, which finds a middle-aged Ellie living on Fire Island working on her art. Ellie is a painter, and she has a bit of a following. She has two sons, Leo, the sixteen-year-old son of her second husband Charles, and seven-year-old Tommy, who was left as a baby by his mother in Ellie's care.

When Leo runs away from his boarding school, Ellie tracks him down in Hollywood, where he hopes to find a career as an actor in the movies. She intends to take him back home, but after finding him, she decides to give him a chance at the screen test his young agent Freddie has set up for him.

Leo gets a small role in a war movie, and Ellie doesn't have the heart to make Leo give up his dream. As an artist, she understands Leo's desire to express himself. She brings Tommy and Bridie, the elderly woman whom she first met when they both worked as household staff years ago in New York, to Hollywood.

The family sets up in Hollywood where they seem to enjoy the sunshine lifestyle. This is a different Ellie than we have seen before. In the first two books, she was working and struggling to build a life for herself and her community. Now Ellie is middle-aged, and responsible for her two sons.

Ellie had miscarriages during her marriage to John, which brought her great sadness. She never thought she would have children, and now her life revolves around her children. Many women who have children will understand Ellie's feelings about her children growing older and needing her less.

This Ellie is more contemplative, more reflective about her life. She doesn't have to work so hard, she has more time to think. She met an older man, a music composer, on the train to Hollywood, and they continued their relationship in Hollywood.

Kerrigan's characters are so multi-dimensional, even the minor ones. Stan, the composer, loves Ellie, but he is not willing to pine for her if she will give him no chance. Freddie, the agent, is not some sleazy Hollywood type, but a young man with a goal and he becomes a part of Ellie's family. Even Freddie's actress-girlfriend, who could be a golddigger, is interesting.

Many times in trilogies, the main character remains stagnant from book to book. In Kate Kerrigan's Ellis Island series, we experience the growth and depth of Ellie from young girl desperately in love with  her husband and willing to move to America to save his life, to grieving young widow who channels her grief by building a community for those in need to middle-aged mother who loves her children enough to give them their dreams and in turn find her own.

rating 4 of 5
My review of Ellis Island is here.
My review of City of Hope is here.

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Kate Kerrigan's tour. The rest of her stops are here:

Kate’s Tour Stops

Thursday, October 9th: Drey’s Library

Friday, October 10th: A Book Geek

Tuesday, October 14th: Kritters Ramblings

Friday, October 17th: Diary of an Eccentric

Monday, October 20th: Savvy Verse & Wit

Tuesday, October 21st: FictionZeal

Wednesday, October 22nd: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, October 23rd: 5 Minutes For Books

Friday, October 24th: bookchickdi

Wednesday, October 29th: The Gilmore Guide to Books

Thursday, October 30th: The Reader’s Hollow

City of Hope by Kate Kerrigan

City of Hope by Kate Kerrigan
Published by William Morrow ISBN 978-0-06-223729-3
Trade paperback, $14.99, 400 pages

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Kate Kerrigan, the charming Irish author of Ellis Island, a novel about a young Irish woman who came to America to earn money to pay for an operation her husband back in Ireland desperately needed after an injury.

Set in the 1920s, Ellie comes to New York to work first as a maid, and then learns how to be a secretary. She falls in love with a wealthy businessman and when it comes time to go home to Ireland, she is torn.

City of Hope opens in the 1930s back in Ireland, on the farm where Ellie lives with her husband John. John loves his life as a farmer, but Ellie wants more. She opened a shop near the farm to sell grocery items and products grown on the farm. She started a secretarial school and a beauty salon. Ellie was quite the businesswoman and always looking for ways to expand, much to John's consternation.

When John dies unexpectedly, Ellie is devastated. She runs away, back to New York, to try and pick up the pieces of her life. A chance meeting with a mother and her children, homeless and living in Central Park, convinced her to try and do something to help them.

She buys a home that has been foreclosed on and moves this family in, along with Bridie, an older woman who worked with her as a maid many years ago. They work to rebuild the house, and find that there are many men with construction skills looking for work in the Great Depression.

Ellie finds a new mission for her life- refurbishing homes and giving people a chance to rebuild their lives. She hopes that all of this will keep her from missing John. She meets many new people, and puts her talents to good use. She starts a cooperative, where the women open a cafe and store, selling their prepared food to the wealthy women in the neighborhood.

Then people comes back into her life unexpectedly: her old friend Sheila and a man from her past. Ellie must face up to her past and decide what path she is going to take.

I have to admit that at times I did not understand Ellie's actions. She seems to run away from her problems rather than face them. After John's death, she runs to New York and hides out, leaving John's mother all alone. At the end of the novel she makes a decision that I find baffling. Although I would make different decisions, Kerrigan skillfully creates such an intriguing character that I found myself rooting for her even as I found her maddening.

I love books that take me into a completely new world, and City of Hope does just that. I did not realize that there were Hooverville tent cities in Central Park during the Depression. Kerrigan clearly did a great deal of research to bring this interesting period of time in New York City to such vivid life.

The characters are so well drawn, and I found that if I closed my eyes, I could picture the street in Upper Manhattan where Ellie created new lives for so many people. The problems that Ellie's friends faced during the Great Depression resonated with the problems that face many people today- the loss of jobs and their homes, forcing their families out into the streets. I liked the parallel there.

My favorite line in the book is one from Ellie during John's funeral.

"I shut down. I did not have the room to absorb all their grief, when I could not accommodate my own."

That just hit such a visceral note for me.

If you have read Ellis Island, City of Hope is a must read. Even if you haven't read Ellis Island, City of Hope stands on its own, a novel about grief and new beginnings, and a wonderful piece of historical fiction set during the Great Depression in New York City. (And if you are a fan of Downton Abbey, Bridie reminds me so much of Mrs. Patmore!)

rating 5 of 5

Kate Kerrigan's website is here.
My review of Ellis Island is here.

Other stops on Kate Kerrigan's TLC Tour are:

Tuesday, June 25th: bookchickdi

Wednesday, June 26th: Books in the City

Wednesday, June 26th: Peeking Between the Pages

Thursday, June 27th: Tina’s Book Reviews

Friday, June 28th: Diary of an Eccentric

Monday, July 1st: A Book Geek

Wednesday, July 3rd: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, July 4th: 2 Kids and Tired Book Reviews

Monday, July 8th: Dwell in Possibility

Tuesday, July 16th: Peppermint PhD

Monday, July 22nd: Becca’s Byline

Tuesday, July 23rd: The House of the Seven Tails

Thursday, July 25th: The Maiden’s Court

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me and William Morrow for providing a copy of the book.