Banished Children of Eve: 2a Novel of Civil War New York

Peter Quinn's "Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York" is everything that historical fiction should be. It is an engaging story laced with characters drawn from history, intertwined with the author's own characters. The result is a novel on an epic scale which captures the gritty flavor of Civil War era Manhattan. Readers of Doctorow's "Ragtime" or Baker's "Paradise Alley" or Delillo's "Underworld" will find themselves in familiar terrain here. Those not familiar with this type of prose may be put off by the insertion of history into the narrative or may wonder at how exact this history is. There is no doubting the precision of any of Quinn's research. Reading this book hot on the heels of Barnet Schecter's "The Devil's Own Work", I can make that assertion with utmost confidence. But this, in no way, is meant to take away from the other element of the novel, and that is the sympathy we have for most of the characters. The financier, the archibishop and his assistant, the minstrel player, the maid, the barkeep, and the man who frames the book, James Dunne, breaking/entering and yegg specialist. In no other novel, in my opinion, is the plight of the famine Irish and the generation that followed more poignantly and dramatically portrayed. This book has been in print for over ten years. These are just some of the reasons for that. Rocco Dormarunno author of The Five Points, a Novel

I grew up in New York and walked many of the same streets Peter Quinn writes about in Banished Children of Eve. They're still there. If you look down at the pavement in some of the older neighborhoods, the same slate and stone sidewalks might still be in place that were there in 1863. Even if the remnants of that old city were plowed under by the wrecking ball, even before the terrorist came with his commandeered passenger jets, other remnants remained. And Gettysburg is not the only place where one feels the presence of ghosts.Quinn's novel is imperfect. It's overly long and one could almost say the writing is florid, the style at points too meandering. But we are modernists or postmodernists, we are in a damned hurry and we want our plots laid out before us rapid-fire. Quinn slows us down. He draws us into the nexus of an old city beneath the city we know, a place of ugliness that makes even the ugliness of today's New York seem bucolic: today's racism and poverty are as nothing compared to what we find in Civil War New York.Here people are still able to reinvent themselves and shapeshift. The daughter of a former stockbroker ruined in the 1857 Panic reinvents herself as the Trumpeter Swan, ultra-whore of a concert saloon and chief attraction of a peepshow for masturbating Union officers. A financier comes from nowhere, builds his fortune on a lie born of pre-computer identity-theft, brutally kills (of course in New Jersey!) to preserve his money, disappears, resurfaces as someone else and proves you can get away with murder. A safecracker becomes a hero in spite of himself and becomes the grandfather of a Jesuit Rector of Fordham University. A half-black woman masquerades as a Cuban actress.Through it all runs the sense of tragedy, of a city burying its own past. Midian Wells disappears from Staten Island to Troy, graveyards are overturned for new building sites, the grave of a department store magnate is robbed for his grave desecrations, and ultimately the characters with whom we identify by novel's end are forgotten two generations later, plowed under by the present as Potter's Field is covered over by layers of new dead. What survives? Ironically, the monument of a decrepit Archbishop--St. Patrick's Cathedral--and the songs of a hopeless alcoholic, Stephen Foster, whose periodic appearances in the novel are perhaps its most gratuitous as well as ghastly element, a sense of living death hauled into view when real death, the slaughter of innocent and guilty alike, looms through the Draft Riots of July 1863, hanging over the novel like the diseases that swept through New York with the irregularity of sawteeth, and just as viciously.The book is a hard read for people who want it easy. It's not linear, it's not always fun, and it's calculated at moments to make you turn your head away. I dread the idea that someone might wish to make a movie of Banished Children of Eve and "straighten it out." Its disconnectedness is its flaw

This is a lovely lyrical book which accurately captures life in New York at that time. Quinn writes the way Irish tenors sing with rolling musical cadences that tumble and flow to heart breaking crescendos. The famine, migration and life in New York have never been written of with such compassion and artistry. It opened my eyes in a completely new way. Obviously, I loved this book.

I just finished reading "Lincoln" and was pleasantly surprised with this book filling in some blanks. It was enjoyable to read for an historical fiction fan. Some of the facts were things one doesn't usually learn about. Instead of a distraction, I thought all the characters and story lines were wonderful. The book worked just like a large city, lots of things and people and sometimes events just bring them together. One of my favorite books. I would read it again.

This book is very much underrated; it's a great pity it has not received the attention it deserves. Besides being a great read, it offers genuine and truthful insights into the Irish Immigrant in America. It's an essential read for anyone interested in the history, character and role of the Irish in nineteenth century America.