Moon and the Mars

June 14, 2021
Playwright and novelist Corthron (The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter) combines a propulsive coming-of-age story with a fascinating history of the years before and after the Civil War. Beginning in 1857, biracial seven-year-old narrator Theo Brigid Brook observes the social upheaval and racial injustice leading to the conflict. She lives in Manhattan’s infamous Five Points neighborhood with her Grammy Brook and Grammy Cahill, who are discriminated against for being Irish and Black, respectively. Other residents of the Brook household include a barber who boards with them and a woman who escaped from slavery in South Carolina. Theo is acutely attuned to such events as the Metropolitan Police riots, and her intense relationship with the rough-and-tumble Irish lad Ciaran seems fated from an early age. While Theo is bookish and entrenched in family and community, Ciaran eschews education and takes a series of manual labor jobs. Corthron smoothly weaves in historical developments as divisions flare in the Five Points, such as the implications of the Dred Scott case, something Grammy Brook sums up concisely: “Whenever the rich make a crisis, you know what gonna fall to the poor is catastrophe.” Corthron’s ambition pays off with dividends.

July 15, 2021
Historical fiction set in New York City's Irish and Black communities before and during the Civil War. Theodora "Theo" Brigid Brook, born in 1850 to an Irish mother and Black father, grows up in Five Points. An orphan from an early age, Theo is raised in two cultures--one Irish, at Grammy Cahill's, the other Black, at Grammy Brook's. Both multigenerational families feature intriguing, well-imagined characters, especially Auntie Siobhan, who runs a tavern she inherited from her late husband, and Auntie Eunice, who starts a ladies salon in Greenwich Village; and both are further enriched through fostered characters, the Cahills with cousin Ciaran, an Irish immigrant who struggles to stay out of trouble, and the Brooks with Auntie Maryam, a former slave who escapes north via the Underground Railroad. Theo is present for many major events, like Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Institute speech, and discusses everything she misses with her hypererudite relatives, who are as informed about politics and current events as any internet-era journalist could dream of being. The novel relies heavily on contemporaneous newspaper articles, scores of which are partially reprinted, quoted from memory, read aloud, or teased by newsboys shouting from street corners. And while these and other recitations of historical fact, about Tammany Hall, the Dred Scott case, the Hall Carbine Affair, and so much more, are unquestionably informative, characters who speak like Wikipedia entries don't necessarily make for engaging fiction. Theo has the outlines of a truly memorable character, but it feels as if Corthron chose the comprehensiveness of a textbook--there is a 20-page bibliography--over a narrative that would catalyze an absorbing novel. An ambitious, educational novel that tries to do too much.

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