Review of NORTH RIVER (audiobook 2007) by guest blogger Star Lawrence
Author, Pete Hamill; read by Henry Strozier
It’s 1934. Dr. John Delaney is moping around his townhouse, taking care of patients and obsessing over his daughter, Grace, who has taken her infant son and left for Mexico or Spain or someplace looking for her husband, who is some kind of half-vast revolutionary. Delaney is also processing his wife Molly’s decision of some years before to walk out of the house, never to return. Is she drifting in the currents of the North River? Apparently, this guy has kinda bad luck with women.
Sound like a Hallmark special? Not so fast. When Delaney returns home one day, his grandson, Carlito, about 3, is stuffed into a rickety troller in his front hall—here, Dad, I have to check Europe for hubs.
Delaney’s furious, not all warm and fuzzy. But the kid is hungry and can’t reach the toilet to pee, so things need attending to. He muddles on.
Of course, he begins to like hanging out with the kid and teaching him things about New York, but at the same time, he has gotten crosswise of a Mafia war. They even threaten the tot.
But Rose, the babysitter/nurse/etc. he found, is Sicilian, off the boat. She knows a thing or two about these goombahs.
I don’t want to give anything away, but this is not a touchy-feely. We wouldn’t expect that from Pete Hamill, anyway.
The reader is a wonderfully deliberate, rumbly guy named Henry Strozier, whom I have heard before.
I got so caught up in these people, I thought sadly at one point—some of them may be dead now. Wait—they never lived at all, this is fiction. Really good fiction can make you think things like that.
Star Lawrence is a health writer and author of the blog HEALTH'Sass.
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