Dreamland

by Kevin Baker

Overview

A literary tour de force, a magnificent chronicle of a remarkable era and a place of dreams

In a stunning work of imagination and memory, author Kevin Baker brings to mesmerizing life a vibrant, colorful, thrilling, and dangerous New York City in the earliest years of the twentieth century. A novel breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it is the epic saga of newcomers drawn to the promise of America—gangsters and laborers, hucksters and politicians, radicals, reformers, murderers, and sideshow oddities—whose stories of love, revenge, and tragedy interweave and shine in the artificial electric dazzle of a wondrous place called Dreamland.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060852726
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/03/2006
Series:	City of Fire Trilogy Series , #1
Pages:	688
Sales rank:	233,912
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Kevin Baker is the bestselling author of the novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Sometimes You See It Coming. He is a columnist for American Heritage magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harper's, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Stella.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I know a story.

"I know a story," said Trick the Dwarf, and the rest of them leaned in close: Nanook the Esquimau, and Ota Benga the Pygmy, and Yolanda the Wild Queen of the Amazon.

"What kind of story?"

Yolanda's eyes bulged suspiciously, and it occurred to him again how she alone might actually be as advertised: tiny, leather-skinned woman with a mock feather headdress, betel nut juice dribbling out through the stumps of her teeth. A mulatto from Caracas, or a Negro Seminole woman from deep in the Okefenokee, at least.

"What kind of a story?"

He swiped at the last swathes of greasepaint around his neck and ears, and looked down the pier of the ruined park to the west before replying. All gone now, even the brilliant white tower festooned with eagles, its beacon reaching twenty miles out to sea. Gone, gone.

It was evening, and the lights were just going up along Surf Avenue: a million electric bulbs spinning a soft, yellow gauze over the beach and parks. The night crowd was already arriving, pouring off the New York & Sea Beach line in white trousers and dresses, white jackets and skirts and straw hats--all quickly absorbed by the glowing lights.

The City of Fire was coming to life.

He could hear the muffled fart of a tuba from the German oompah band warming up in Feltman's beer garden. Beyond the garden was the Ziz coaster, hissing and undulating through the trees lay the peculiar sound that gave it its name. Beyond that was the high glass trellises of Steeplechase Park, with its ubiquitous idiot's face and slogan, repeated over and over--steeplechase--funny place--steeplechase--funny place--beyond that the ocean, where asingle, low-slung freighter was making for Seagate ahead of the night.

He could see even further. He could see into the past--where Piet Cronje's little Boer cottage had stood, or the Rough Riders coaster, before some fool sailed it right off the rails, sixty feet into the air over Surf Avenue. Where a whole city had stood, back beyond the ruined pier--

Meet me tonight in Dreamland

Under the silvery moon

Soon, he knew, the soft yellow lights would be honed by the darkness into something sharper. They would become hard and clear: fierce little pearls of fire, obliterating everything else with their brightness.

None of them now on the pier would see it, not Yolanda or Ota Benga or Nanook the Esquimau. They would be working by then, in their booths and sideshows. They would not see the lights again until they were on their way home, in the early morning; would see them only as they shutdown, already faded to a fraudulent, rosy hue by the sun rising over the ocean.

Meet me tonight in Dreamland

Where love's sweet roses bloom

Come with the lovelight gleaming

In your dear eyes of blue

Meet me in Dreamland

Sweet dreamy Dreamland

There let my dreams come true

They liked to sit out on the ruined pier during the dinner hour, between the heavy action of the day and the night shows. They slumped on the rotted pilings, where once a hundred excursion boats a day had tied up, to smoke and eat, and spit and smoke and tell their stories: Ota Benga, spindly and humpbacked, no real pygmy but a tubercular piano player from Kansas City, exotic moniker lifted from an old carny sensation of the past--

In the City everything was passed down, even the names of the freaks and the gangsters--

--Nanook the Massive, Nanook the Implacable, slit-eyed hero of the north--who was in fact a woman from some extinguished Plains tribe, signed on after her old man had tried to force her into whoring at the Tin Elephant hotel along Brighton Beach.

And then there was Yolanda. Immense frog eyes still staring up at him, curved beak of a nose, skin the color and texture of a well-used saddle--

"It's a love story," Trick told her. "It's a story about love, and jealousy, and betrayal. A story about a young man, the young woman who loved him, and a terrible villain--a story about death, and destruction, and fire. It is a story about thieves and cutthroats, and one man's vision, and the poor man's burden, and the rich man's condescension.

"It is a story about Kid Twist, the gangster, and Gyp the Blood, who was a killer, and Big Tim the politician, and poor Beansy Rosenthal, who couldn't keep his mouth shut. It is a story about Sadie the whore, and the brave Esther, and the mad Carlotta, and the last summer they all came together in the great park.

"It is a story about the Great Head Doctors from Vienna, and the rampages of beasts, and the wonders of the Modern Age. It is a story about a great city, and a little city, and a land of dreams. And always, above all, it is a story about fire."

"Ah," said Yolanda, satisfied now, leaning back and lighting up her pipe. "Ah. The usual."

What People are Saying About This

Iain Pears

Dreamland is a fascinating and compelling novel. The real star, perhaps, is the city itself, which Mr. Baker depicts in all its garish, squalid, exuberant, frightening magnificence through his intricate patchwork of bizarre and finely drawn characters.

Geoffrey C. Ward

Dreamland is an astonishment -- an irresistable epic made up of equal parts persuasive history and richly satisfying fantasy. With this remarkable novel, Kevin Baker establishes himself as a master of the form.

Reading Group Guide

Dreamland is a historical novel that recreates turn-of-the century New York, bringing to life an entire era and capturing the essence of the American immigrant experience. Each character in Kevin Baker's diverse cast represents a different walk of life from New York, circa 1910.

Dreamland's heroine, Esther "Esse" Abramowitz, is a perfect example of the strength and resilience of the immigrant spirit. A hard-working laborer in a Lower East Side sweatshop, Esse never ceases in her various struggles for independence, equality, and fair treatment against exploitative employers and society's traditional views of the role of women. Esse's coming-of-age coincides with her love affair with Kid Twist, a stowaway from the Old World. The action of Dreamland begins with Kid Twist's violent falling-out with the feared gangster leader Gyp the Blood, setting in motion a long series of events that lead ultimately to a startling and unexpected finale on Coney Island.

The stories of Esse and Kid Twist are intertwined with tales of a multitude of characters, most drawn straight from the pages of history, such as Tammany Hall political boss Big Tim Sullivan; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Karl Jung, his protégé; Beansy Rosenthal, whose testimony in a police corruption case threatens to undermine Tammany Hall, and whose murder plays a catalytic role in the events of this novel; and numerous others, real and imagined, from Coney Island at a time when it was one of the most miraculous spectacles of the modern world.

Dreamland is a story about survival, about human beings living day-to-day, persevering against the odds.Turn-ofthe-century New York was truly a remarkable place and time; while it held for most immigrants more promise than the lands from which they'd come, it introduced hardship and cataclysmic disappointment on a scale virtually unimaginable from today's perspective. From Esse, who was destined to work in a sweatshop and live in a filthy, crowded tenement, to Trick the Dwarf, eking out a living as a sideshow freak, basic survival consumed the bulk of people's time and spirit. For the poor, especially destitute immigrants, life was often a bitter struggle for the American Dream, an elusive and uncertain end in itself. Of course, honest work wasn't the only way -- or even the best way -- to make it in New York; indeed, there seemed greater opportunity through gangsterism, crime, and corruption. Esse and Gyp the Blood escape their common oppressive circumstance through opposite roots. Survival dictates that Kid Twist become a gangster, despite a moral aversion to the work expected of him. Whether these characters sewed or killed, sweat or cheated, earning enough to live another week was often all that mattered.

And on the weekend? For Esse, as for thousands of immigrants, the Sunday off provided the opportunity to mix with all walks of life in Coney Island -- the magical city where bright lights cast a soft glow on hard lives and the surf of the Atlantic washed away fears and troubles. All kinds of people came together in Coney Island in a strange and dynamic synergy. Whores mixed with factory workers and gangsters with freaks; midgets lived out their dreams of normalcy and onlookers reveled in the spectacle. When it came time for dreaming, the playing field leveled, and the rich and the poor alike went to Coney's parks -- Steeplechase, Luna Park, and of course, Dreamland. There they could release their tensions and worries and fears, and find excitement in a stolen caress, comfort in the misfortune of others, beauty in a ride that left the surf below and soared in to the sky above... truly a land of dreams that provided a haven from the rough-and-tumble of life in a sometimes unforgiving New York City.

Historical Notes: The era in which Dreamland takes place was one of immense social change and upheaval. In many ways, the social landscape changed dramatically to accommodate the rapidly shifting composition of New York's population. From the late 1800's until 1920, foreign immigrants grew to comprise close to half of New York City's already sizable population. It is an understatement, then, to say that immigration played a huge role in turn-of-the-century New York. Kevin Baker's Dreamland is the very portrait of this New York. Besides capturing the essence of this era of rampant change and diversification, Mr. Baker also adhered to a general framework of historical reality. In his own words, he explains, "My own feeling is that you can't beat reality; the best you can do is try to rearrange it." Thus, much of Dreamland is fact-based, particularly as Trick the Dwarf reminds us in his opening soliloquy how Dreamland is "a story about fire," and the infernos described within the novel were very real. The Triangle Fire was a tragedy that had enormous impact on city life in New York and elsewhere in the years that followed. On March 25, 1911, 146 people, most of whom were young garment workers, perished in the fire that consumed one of the city's biggest sweatshops. In the Asch Building, home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and east of today's Washington Square Park, firefighters fought helplessly against the raging conflagration. Ultimately, many women were forced to jump out of windows stories above the street, unsure of whether anything would catch them other than the concrete sidewalks below.

The other fire central to the book is, of course, the burning of Dreamland itself, which occurred on May 26 of the same year. Workers were putting the finishing touches on fixing a leak that had sprung a few days before in the cavern walls of Hellgate, Coney's version of a boat ride on the River Styx. Suddenly, overhead light bulbs began to pop and explode, which, coupled with a spilled bucket of tar, set the park ablaze in moments. By 4 a.m. the next morning, the phantasmagorical Dreamland had burned to the ground, at a total uninsured loss of more than $5.2 million and 2,500 jobs.

Questions for Discussion

A key issue for immigrants has been the struggle to assimilate into their new homeland without sacrificing hallmarks of many different distinct cultures with them. What legacies have the various characters in Dreamland brought with them from their respective Old Worlds? Take Esse's family in particular and highlight how the old and the new clash, and how each member deals with the assimilation process differently.

Author Kevin Baker challenges the reader to sniff out various hidden historical figures in Dreamland. How many can you name?

Along those same lines, how difficult is it to distinguish between history and Mr. Baker's craft in the novel? Can you separate the fiction from the reality? How fine do you think that line is in your own perception of and involvement in the making of history right now?

Violence and beauty are often very closely associated in Dreamland. Why might they share close ties? Cite specific examples from the book.

Love is often tested in Dreamland. Whether faced with family disapproval, the threat of physical dangers, divisive politics, or simply the dynamics of a rapidly changing world, many of the book's characters meet the challenge put forth by love in its many different forms. For example, Kid Twist's loyalty to Esse never waned, not even in the face of death; Trick's love for Carlotta was uncompromised by her madness; even power-hungry Big Tim Sullivan's heart opened children everywhere. In light of this, how much do you think that characters' motivations were shaped by love in Dreamland? About the Author: Kevin Baker was born in 1958 in Englewood, New Jersey, but grew up mainly in Rockport, Massachusetts. His career in writing began early; his first professional job was at age 13, as a stringer covering school sports for The Glouchester Daily Times. After graduating from Rockport High School and from Columbia University with a degree in political science, he worked at a number of freelance and writing jobs, including writing political position papers for the Public Securities Association and answering letters for the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York. Mr. Baker then signed on as the chief historical researcher for Harold Evans's celebrated history of the 20th century, The American Century (Knopf), which was a 1998 New York Times bestseller. In 1993 Mr. Baker published his first novel, loosely based on the legend of baseball great Ty Cobb entitled Sometimes You See It Coming. Dreamland represents what Mr. Baker envisions to be the first volume in a trilogy of historical novels set in New York.

Editorial Reviews

Once Upon a Time in America

Fans of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime will recognize the sweeping, historical-mixed-with-fictional style of this sprawling novel about early-20th-century New York, a fitting read as we approach the millennium. Like Doctorow, historian (and chief researcher for Harold Evans's The American Century) Baker hosts a kind of sociological carnival, in which a Coney Island dwarf, a Tammany Hall politician, a sweatshop girl (not to mention Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, among many, many others) lead parallel and eventually intersecting lives in a tumultuous time whose motto seems to be, Get it while you can. Passionate and violent, with surprising passages of sweet lyricism and rough humor, this expansive and multilayered story is the kind of novel Tom Wolfe might write, were he devoted to an earlier time.

How to introduce and describe each character? There are so many that a reviewer with space limitations is at a loss; it's no wonder that Baker's novel fills more than 500 pages, despite the fact that his plot is quite simple. Dreamland is about surviving and sidestepping ethnicity, poverty, and corruption to make it in America. Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, a striver: Essie, the sweatshop girl, chafes at the strict controls of her religious Jewish father; Trick, the dwarf, at the limitation of his size and his role as a Coney Island performer; Tammany Hall politician Tim Sullivan at the confines of what must surely have been the most corrupt government in American history. And then there's Gyp the Blood, who might be called a pimp with a heart of gold; about halfway through the narrative it is revealed that he is, in fact, Essie's long-lost brother, a young man who has decided that the only way to escape his family is to live as a street thug and whoremaster. His relationship with Sadie, his chief prostitute, eventually leads him back to his family and to love. Jumping in and out of the narrative, like the 20th-century Jewish intellectual version of a Greek chorus, are Jung and Freud, who work at and feud over the development of their respective psychiatric philosophies.

Sound complicated, a bit over-the-top? Dreamland is both, and it can sometimes be overwhelming in its sheer volume and boisterousness. (Here's where fans and critics alike may be reminded of Wolfe.) Still, in its quieter passages -- the love scenes between Essie and Kid, for example, or the confrontations between Gyp and his estranged father -- Dreamland is quite moving. The Freud/Jung scenes -- most notably the one in which Freud wets himself during the recounting of a dream -- provide a kind of egghead's comedy that complements the baser ribaldry elsewhere in the book. Most readers won't "get" everything on first reading, which is perhaps why Baker leads his story to its inevitable and recognizable conclusion: the Triangle sweatshop fire, which mesmerized and horrified all of New York, its street people, immigrants, politicians, and intellectuals alike. It is in these final chapters -- the last fifth of the book -- that Dreamland most succeeds and its many themes are brought together. "America is a mistake," Freud opines toward the end of the novel. "A gigantic mistake, it is true, but a mistake none the less."

Yet for all its violence and pessimism (one can only imagine what the PC police will make of the rather prurient scenes of the whores in jail), Dreamland emerges as a thoughtful book, infused with the kind of energy that has come to be defined (by jealous Europeans, perhaps) as definitively American. Its scope is wide and its characters peculiar -- and yet it chronicles a time and set of experiences that are filled with possibility and of promise. And for all of its minor characters and subplots, the arc of Baker's novel is complete and satisfying. It opens with a scene of shipboard immigrants approaching Coney Island, which looks to them like a city in flames, and ends with a real conflagration: the Triangle fire. Have the characters we've come to know so well perished in what seems the dramatically appropriate result of their mixed-up lives? Will this shocking, cataclysmic event augur any change in the way people live? That's the question that will likely keep book groups arguing for hours, though Baker coyly hedges his bets, suggesting that win or lose, live or die, the world probably goes on pretty much as usual. As the new century approaches, there are still confused immigrants, ruthless politicians, and more than seven million stories in the Naked City. Who will live to tell all these tales? With a wink and a smile, Baker lets Freud -- whom he calls one of the "Great Head Doctors from Vienna" -- have the last convoluted word.

—Sara Nelson

bn.com

A virtuoso performance...a miracle [that] has materialized right before our eyes. More than anything Dreamland is a novel about love — love and kindness, generosity and endurance, in spite of it all, Dickensian in scope and intellectual breadth, Kevin Baker's masterpiece is Ragtime but without the sprawling misanthropy; Tom Wolfe but with characters that are human, not merely theoretical; Dreiser but superbly written; Sinclair Lewis but with a mystic's heart.

Esquire

A Dickensian epic...meticulously researched and filled with passages of intoxicating, dreamlike frenzy.
—Entertainment Weekly

Bilge Ebiri

An epic recreation of an era...a boisterous, rollicking carnival.

People Magazine

Remarkable...original...mingles real and fictional characters in an American fin-de-siecle swirl.

Wall Street Journal

Brilliantly imagined...an outrageous celebration of a...more innocent America...still holding out for Horatio Alger's impossible American dream.

San Francisco Chronicle

Dreamland is a wild ride, all the wilder because much of what Baker describes really happened...his book is paced like a police thriller and makes for compelling, occasionally stomach-churning reading.
— USA Today

Linda Mallon

It's a depressing read but a rollicking one—and it will cure any misplaced nostalgia for the past...Baker's historical knowledge is generally an asset, but occasionally it gets in the way of the story....Dreamland isn't a perfect novel, but it's quite a good one, and it doesn't need this heavy-handed embellishment. Sometimes a plot really is just a plot.
— Time Out New York

Susan Jackson

...[A] carnival of a novel....historical fiction of an intricate, epic, fabulous sort.

E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime was a dazzling tour de force, particularly his imaginative mingling of the fictional and historical in his story of turn-of-the-century New York. Occupying the same time and space and employing the same device of mixing the historical and the fictional, Baker's Dreamland will inevitably be compared...but it is very different--more personal and less political. Narrated by a diverse array of characters--two Jewish gangsters, a seamstress, a whore, a Tammany Hall politician, Sigmund Freud, a dwarf from Coney Island--the novel looks at the ways we see ourselves, often distorted as if through a funhouse mirror. Events like a garment workers' strike, the gangland murder of a talkative gambler, and the fire that burned Coney Island's Dreamland swirl together in this larger-than-life story of people trying to understand themselves in a New York that seems out of control.-- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson County Community College Library, Overland Park, Kansas

Library Journal

Epic and atmospheric...a literary gem, polished on all facets.

The Denver Post

Coney island's old Dreamland amusement park becomes a symbol for the American Dream itself in this dazzling historical novel.

The Boston Herald

Joyful...a sexy, dreamy romance....Baker crams every page with impressions, textures, sights, sounds and memories....His triumph is in meshing his fictional creations and a dense historical landscape...The characters' voices, dreams and emotions ring true; their stories...consistently surprise and engage.

LA Times Book Review

Mesmerizing....Dreamland tells us a great deal about what it means to be 'American.'

The Washington Post

Large, knowing, teeming with ambition and personality.

GQ

This is literature -- and history -- at its best.

Christian Science Monitor

Fans of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime will recognize the sweeping, historical-mixed-with-fictional style of this sprawling novel about early-20th-century New York, a fitting read as we approach the millennium. Like Doctorow, historian (and chief researcher for Harold Evans's The American Century) Baker hosts a kind of sociological carnival, in which a Coney Island dwarf, a Tammany Hall politician, a sweatshop girl (not to mention Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, among many, many others) lead parallel and eventually intersecting lives in a tumultuous time whose motto seems to be, Get it while you can. Passionate and violent, with surprising passages of sweet lyricism and rough humor, this expansive and multilayered story is the kind of novel Tom Wolfe might write, were he devoted to an earlier time.

How to introduce and describe each character? There are so many that a reviewer with space limitations is at a loss; it's no wonder that Baker's novel fills more than 500 pages, despite the fact that his plot is quite simple. Dreamland is about surviving and sidestepping ethnicity, poverty, and corruption to make it in America. Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, a striver: Essie, the sweatshop girl, chafes at the strict controls of her religious Jewish father; Trick, the dwarf, at the limitation of his size and his role as a Coney Island performer; Tammany Hall politician Tim Sullivan at the confines of what must surely have been the most corrupt government in American history. And then there's Gyp the Blood, who might be called a pimp with a heart of gold; about halfway through the narrative it is revealed that he is, in fact, Essie's long-lost brother, a young man who has decided that the only way to escape his family is to live as a street thug and whoremaster. His relationship with Sadie, his chief prostitute, eventually leads him back to his family and to love. Jumping in and out of the narrative, like the 20th-century Jewish intellectual version of a Greek chorus, are Jung and Freud, who work at and feud over the development of their respective psychiatric philosophies.

Sound complicated, a bit over-the-top? Dreamland is both, and it can sometimes be overwhelming in its sheer volume and boisterousness. (Here's where fans and critics alike may be reminded of Wolfe.) Still, in its quieter passages -- the love scenes between Essie and Kid, for example, or the confrontations between Gyp and his estranged father -- Dreamland is quite moving. The Freud/Jung scenes -- most notably the one in which Freud wets himself during the recounting of a dream -- provide a kind of egghead's comedy that complements the baser ribaldry elsewhere in the book. Most readers won't "get" everything on first reading, which is perhaps why Baker leads his story to its inevitable and recognizable conclusion: the Triangle sweatshop fire, which mesmerized and horrified all of New York, its street people, immigrants, politicians, and intellectuals alike. It is in these final chapters -- the last fifth of the book -- that Dreamland most succeeds and its many themes are brought together. "America is a mistake," Freud opines toward the end of the novel. "A gigantic mistake, it is true, but a mistake none the less."

Yet for all its violence and pessimism (one can only imagine what the PC police will make of the rather prurient scenes of the whores in jail), Dreamland emerges as a thoughtful book, infused with the kind of energy that has come to be defined (by jealous Europeans, perhaps) as definitively American. Its scope is wide and its characters peculiar -- and yet it chronicles a time and set of experiences that are filled with possibility and of promise. And for all of its minor characters and subplots, the arc of Baker's novel is complete and satisfying. It opens with a scene of shipboard immigrants approaching Coney Island, which looks to them like a city in flames, and ends with a real conflagration: the Triangle fire. Have the characters we've come to know so well perished in what seems the dramatically appropriate result of their mixed-up lives? Will this shocking, cataclysmic event augur any change in the way people live? That's the question that will likely keep book groups arguing for hours, though Baker coyly hedges his bets, suggesting that win or lose, live or die, the world probably goes on pretty much as usual. As the new century approaches, there are still confused immigrants, ruthless politicians, and more than seven million stories in the Naked City. Who will live to tell all these tales? With a wink and a smile, Baker lets Freud -- whom he calls one of the "Great Head Doctors from Vienna" -- have the last convoluted word.

Sara Nelson, the former executive editor of The Book Report, is the book columnist for Glamour. She also contributes to Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and Salon.
— barnesandnoble.com

Sara Nelson

Coney Island's old Dreamland amusement park becomes a symbol for the American Dream itself in this dazzling historical novel.

The Boston Globe

Exhilarating, incandescent and entertaining...you will probably never think about America quite the same.

The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC

A wild amusement park ride...Historical fiction at its most entertaining.
— The New York Times Book Review

Thomas Mallon

A sprawling doorstopper, set in turn-of-the-century New York. Baker's work as chief researcher for Harry Evans' recent The American Century is on generous display here. The various facets of New York and Coney Island, where the ornate park of the title is located, are described in intimate detail: the notorious jail The Tombs, City Hall, the Triangle garment factory, immigrant housing, whiskey bars, and strip joints, all are nicely animated. Meanwhile, dozens of characters stroll through these various locales: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung visit New York and observe the vulgarity of America; Trick the Dwarf tells of the bizarre and the humane at Dreamland-the dwarfs and the bearded ladies-which is the most familiar world he knows; and Esther, a garment worker alienated from her immigrant family, takes an active role in the labor movement. Also on hand are Gyp the Blood, a small-time criminal; Big Tim, the Tammany politico, plus Kid Twist and Sadie and Clara.

Baker is trying to make larger points-for instance, seeing Dreamland as a grotesquely inspired reflection of New York City—but with so many people wandering across the pages of the novel like extras wearing different costumes, the larger ambitions are swallowed by boredom. We are left with authoritatively described, sometimes brutal scenes of corruption, abuse, depravity, manipulation, and coercion that make up a plot whose purpose is cloudy.

Second-timer Baker (Sometimes You See it Coming) does an excellent job of evoking a time and a place, but the novel fails to transcend the genre of Costume Drama, busy as it is with surfaces and slangs, weather and buildings, workbenches and public speeches: thestory projects no center, and it's too easy to forget why it matters at all.

Kirkus Reviews