Maggie-Now

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 8x5x1. Book club edition. Jacket edges rubbed, jacket spine stained. 1958 Hard Cover. 437 pp. "This is the story of Maggie-Now, who grew up with the green young century among the immigrant Irish and Germans of Brooklyn. Maggie-Now was one of the givers of the world; and inevitably she attracted leaners as a post attracts ivy. There was her father, Patrick Dennis, who had been the best jigger and the highest 'lepper' in County Kilkenny, until he fled Ireland, too easily talked out of marrying his true love by a selfish mother. In Brooklyn, Pat was a greenhorn only, a natural butt, and no better than a stable boy for a corrupt ward politican -- until he wedded Mary, the ward politician's schoolteacher daughter and the apple of his eye. Mary lived out her days with Patrick, with serenity and courage. ('I loved you for your ways,' she said. 'I never though they were good ways or bad ways.'). Then Mary left the sixteen-year-old Maggie-Now to care for her father and the infant Denny, but she also left her rich memories of a happy -- it too brief -- childhood; of wonderful Memorial Day excursions to the cemetery, of an unforgettable visit to Boston cousins. Also, if her father was small help or comfort to a young girl suddenly pushed into a woman's place, Maggie-Now had good friends to turn to -- Father Flynn, the deeply understanding parish priest, and the old cigar maker on the corner, and the adoring Lottie, widow of Timmy the cop. (When Timmy died, Patrick Dennis went into mourning because he had lost 'the best enemy a man ever had.') Some of Maggie-Now's warm and steadfast friends worried when, at twenty-three, she met and married Claude. Handsome, educated Claude came out of nowhere to marry Maggie-Now. Each spring he left her because a chinook wind was blowing from the west, and each fall he returned to her to fill her life with love, wonder and splendor. He was not, assuredly, the stuff of which solid husbands are made. In short, Maggie-Now, like her mother, married a leaner. It was young Denny, in his own life and marriage, who broke the pattern. Denny, who was a wild, street-corner lad until he fell truly in love with the fine art of meat cutting in a marvelous butcher shop with the cat Schweinefleisch sitting in the window. But it was Maggie-Now, in full awareness of her own need to be needed, who pushed Denny toward independence. It was very cold the winter that a ragged Claude returned from his last trip. This time he brought two things: the distress of a wanderer come to rest, and the strangeness of a man bent on 'explaining' himself. But, in the end, Maggie-Now was miraculously uplifted by a bright vision of the future. Warm, heart-wise, this story of a wonderful girl growing up in the wonderful world of Brooklyn will rival A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the affections of its readers.