Factory Girls

July 1, 2022

Richard Sharpe returns to the mayhem of the early 19th-century Peninsular War in Cornwell's Sharpe's Command (75,000-copy first printing). Following the LJ-starred Big Girl, Small Town, Gallen's Factory Girls features a young woman in Northern Ireland working a grinding summer job made harder by a sleazy boss. In The World We Make, three-time Hugo Award--winning Jemisin returns to New York City, whose six protective avatars must work with the world's other great cities to waylay a populist mayoral candidate threatening the city's very soul (225,000-copy first printing). Following Kapelke-Dale's well-received debut, The Ballerinas, The Ingenue features a former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis, shocked to learn that her recently deceased mother left the family estate to a man with whom Saskia shares a painful past (200,000-copy first printing). In The Book of Everlasting Things, a debut from Delhi-based oral historian Malhotra, two lovers--perfumer's apprentice Samir, who is Hindu, and calligrapher's apprentice Firdaus, who is Muslim--are violently torn apart during India's Partition in 1947. From Silver Linings Playbook author Quick, We Are the Light limns the relationship between a sorrowing widower and an ostracized teenager. The multi-award-winning Rebecca Roanhorse returns with Tread of Angels, set in a late 1800s Colorado mining town where cardsharp Celeste defends a sister accused of murdering a Virtue, one of the town's ruling class. Having successfully entered the adult arena with A River Enchanted, YA author Ross wraps up her duology with A Fire Endless, set on a magical island whose uneasy balance of human and faerie is threatened by the power-hungry spirit of the North Wind (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Swanson's Things We Found When the Water Went Down, a 16-year-old struggles to find her mother, a crusading environmentalist blamed for a miner's death who vanished in a blizzard. Of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee heritage, Wurth debuts with White Horse, featuring young, Indigenous Kari James, who inadvertently summons both her mother's ghost and a dangerous, blood-eyed creature when she discovers an old bracelet belonging to her mother (100,000-copy first printing). The pseudonymous Zeldis (Not Our Kind) brings together Beatrice, The Dressmaker of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; her assistant, orphaned teenager Alice; and their newlywed neighbor Catherine, amid shifting relationships and secrets bubbling up from the past (50,000-copy first printing).

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September 19, 2022
Irish writer Gallen (Big Girl, Small Town) offers a sharp chronicle of the coming-of-age of three Catholic teenage girls during the waning days of the Troubles. In the summer of 1994, acerbic Maeve Murray, fancy Aoife O’Neill, and timid Caroline Jackson all take jobs at the shirt factory in their tiny Northern Ireland town while they await their A-level results. Maeve, desperate to get away from the painful memory of her older sister’s suicide, rents an apartment with Caroline and daydreams of her escape to journalism school in London while ironing piles of shirts and grappling with her sexual attraction to her shifty British manager, who doesn’t return her advances but boosts her wages and has a reputation for sleeping with employees. Aoife, who has her sights on Cambridge, also works an iron but finagles her way into training for a higher-skilled position, while Caroline winds up having to manage her expectations. The three develop a camaraderie as they deal with the disdain and cruelty of their Protestant coworkers and try to figure out their futures. Gallen offers piercing snapshots of the characters’ everyday lives amid steady bursts of sectarian violence, such as Maeve’s mother getting discounts on shoes after the store’s glass is shattered by a bomb. This is lovely. Agent: Marianne Gunn, O’Conor Creative.

Starred review from October 1, 2022
Maeve is spending the long, boring summer between school and adulthood in her small, northern Irish hometown. Accompanying her are best friends Caroline, of a similar, council-house background, and middle-class Aoife, as well as the ghost of her sister Deirdre, who committed suicide some years ago at a similar stage in her life. The girls have three things circling their minds: money, independence, and (hopefully) enrolling in university in the fall. Before that, they must survive working in the local shirt factory for lecherous Brit Andy Strawbridge, who sees the town's easily exploited workforce as his ticket to big money and a steady stream of impressionable, young Irish girls. Gallen fluidly juxtaposes the pedestrian worries of small-town life against the Troubles of the mid-1990s, as Maeve's journalistic mind seeks answers to the mysteries of the factory's funders while she's struggling with a crush on Aoife's brother, who would just bring her more of what she loathes about home. Protection payments, loyalist marches, clashes between the mixed factory workforce, and more culminate in an explosive denouement in which Maeve must confront her conflicting feelings about home and the potential of an unknown future. For fans of Derry Girls and the plucky heroines of Marian Keyes.

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Starred review from September 15, 2022
A teenage girl comes of age working at a factory during the last days of the Troubles. Maeve Murray has one goal in the summer of 1994: to get out of her small town in Northern Ireland and escape to London for university. But she won't know whether that's possible until she gets her exam results, and in the meantime, she and her two closest friends, Caroline Jackson and Aoife O'Neill, decide to earn money working at the local shirt-making factory. The factory, which is managed by smarmy, handsy, and distressingly handsome Englishman Andy Strawbridge, is a rare space where Catholics and Protestants are forced to coexist despite the constant threat of sectarian violence. For one summer, everything in Maeve's life is on the brink of change: her education, her relationships with friends and family, and even the factory, a precarious social experiment vulnerable to both sectarian strife and "optimisation" that could crush workers from both factions. Gallen, who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, reconstructs this era vividly. Her characters speak in dialect, but, more importantly, their understanding of the world is shaped by their experience of the Troubles. Maeve wishes to escape the sectarian environment in which she's been raised while also viewing Protestants with suspicion, confusion, and, at times, lust. Gallen's mastery of her protagonist's psychology renders this muddle comprehensible, sympathetic, and, above all, funny. Truly humorous novels are hard to come by, but Gallen's writing is full of genuine bite. Maeve shares her creator's wit and insight: "[Tony] Blair looked like the sort of toothy creature you'd see in a Free Presbyterian church," she reflects, "a man who believed way too hard in the wrong thing." A sensationally entertaining novel that's deeper than it first appears.

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Starred review from August 1, 2022

It's 1994, just before the Irish peace agreement, and 18-year-old Maeve Murray is waiting for her life to begin. More specifically, she is awaiting exam results that will confirm her acceptance to university and provide an escape from her Northern Ireland hometown and the violence endemic of the times. She will also leave behind her family, still grieving the tragic death of her older sister. So Maeve considers herself fortunate when she and her two best friends land summer jobs at a shirt factory and find cheap lodging across the street. The work is grueling, as Maeve is assigned to the ironing station where she is on her feet steam-pressing hundreds of shirts a day. But the pay will help fund her university expenses, and the summer will open the girls' eyes to the other side of the conflict and to the dodgy business practices condoned by both sides. VERDICT From the author of Big Girl, Small Town, this novel is a wonder; the heroine is cheeky, the humor dark, the dialect thick, the sorrow palpable. Fans of Kenneth Branagh's Belfast and television's Derry Girls will find much to love.--Barbara Love

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.