Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.
Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life.
Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America, and the world.
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[They'd driven all the way to Mr. Style's house before Anna realised that her father was nervous]***
(Little Brown, 3 October 2017, ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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What a way to start October, binge-reading this fantastic book. I hope the rest of the month is just as enjoyable.
I was hooked from the opening chapter all the way to the end.
There are so many things I loved about this book:
Anna is a great heroine, feisty yet vulnerable, the secrets shared by Anna and Dexter, Anna's life with her mother and crippled sister, haunted by her father who vanished without a trace, Anna struggling to be taken seriously as a woman trying to get involved in war work, the setting, brought to brilliant life by the author and the tragic events that seem determined to throw Anna's life out of orbit.
I was riveted by Manhattan Beach. I rarely read historical fiction or literary fiction but I'm glad I got a chance to read this book. It's engrossing.
