Kirkus Book Review

Grief is love with nowhere to go..

 In 1883, Irishwoman Johanna Kennedy is working at a hotel in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, when her friend Kathleen brings in En Chang, an immigrant from China who’s looking for work. The lives of Johanna and En become entangled as they both experience their own struggles in this new town, which is rife with corruption and the threat of violence from the Molly Maguires as tensions in Ireland spill over into the New World. Matthews has taken as the novel’s subject the intertwined yet very different experiences of two sets of immigrants to America in the latter half of the 19th century: the Chinese and the Irish, both of whom experienced extreme hardship and racism.

The character of Johanna is actually based upon the author’s own great-grandmother, and there’s a loving tenderness applied to her story. A devoted mother to her children who found herself having to marry her husband after her true love died, Johanna is propelled by her experience of loss to try to build a better future—a highly compelling and emotional journey, mired deeply in loss. (A line in the prologue, “c” truly seems to set the theme for Matthews’ novel.) Though much of En’s and Johanna’s stories unfold between 1882 and 1885, the narrative does flash back as far as En’s journey with his family from China to San Francisco in 1860. These sections are great for story building, but they occasionally break up the flow of the main narrative with their sporadic and sometimes uneven appearances. This material lends the novel the feel of an epic, generational story