Two books worth checking out this week at your local Mayo library

BAD BRIDGET

By Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick

Sandycove

THE stories are legion, but there is a depressing familiarity to them after a while. Who knew there were so many Irish women in trouble with the law in North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries?

Delia (Bridget) Jones, who arrived in Boston from her native Claremorris shortly after turning 15, had clocked up more than a dozen court appearances by the time she was 30.

Marion Canning from Leitrim served only a few months of a seven-year sentence for theft before a letter from her father pleading for her release and offering to pay her transport home was heeded by the prosecutor.

Her father’s case was bolstered by a local policeman who knew Canning as a local prostitute, but clarified she was of better character than many of her colleagues.

Rosie Quinn was found guilty of murdering her three-week-old daughter in Central Park in 1902. And another Mayo-born woman, Isabella Anderson (born in Hollymount in 1877), was at the heart of a child kidnapping case that captured the public attention.

When 20-month-old Marion Clarke and her childminder Carrie Jones went missing in Central Park in 1899, the newspapers hung on every development in the story in the weeks and months that followed.

The creators of the Bad Bridget podcast have done comprehensive research, and uncovered thousands of Irish-born women and girls who ended up in trouble in their new home.

It is by no means a light read, but it is a very interesting documentation.

OTHER WOMEN

by Emma Flint

Picador

THEY say a picture paints a thousand words, but there are some books whose words manage to convey a thousand pictures.

Emma Flint, who captured a sticky, scorcher of a 1960s New York summer and a murder case that kept a nation on tenterhooks in her debut novel, Little Deaths, has painted a very different world in this, her second book.

It’s only a few years after the end of the Great War, and many of the women who stepped in to work when the men were away at the Front are wondering what the future holds for them.

Beatrice Cade, an orphan, is neither married nor a mother, and feels at times that she is decidedly ‘less than’. But she’s hungry for better things, so she takes a job in the city and lodgings in a ladies’ club.

Kate Ryan, on the other hand, married with a child, is completely perplexed when the police come to her door and drag her in for questioning about her husband. That is, until she admits that she knows her husband and Beatrice Cade were acquainted.

The rest of the story unfolds in present-day snippets and flashbacks, and the reader learns what has led to the police investigation.

Flint’s descriptions of a still somewhat shell-shocked London, the swathes of wounded men on the streets, and secretarial life in a buttoned-up sales office, are completely immersive.

Like her first book, the story is based on a real-life murder. What she does with the story is what makes it so compelling.

All titles above are available from Mayo library service. Branches near you are: Achill (098) 20910; Ballina (096) 70833; Ballinrobe (094) 9541896; Ballyhaunis (094) 9630161; Belmullet (097) 82555; Castlebar (094) 9047925; Claremorris (094) 9371666; Crossmolina (096) 31939; Foxford (094) 9256040; Kiltimagh (094) 9381786; Louisburgh (098) 66658; Swinford (094) 9252065; Westport (098) 25747. Or check out www.mayo.ie/library for more information and a full library catalogue.