Need a New Book?

*Full Disclosure (it's a hell of a thing...sorry):  I wrote this post in mid-August, trying to be proactive...so I didn't actually just finish reading it...and the books have arrived*

I just finished reading a book.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re a reading teacher who is going to library school. Don’t you do this all the time?

Yes, yes I do.

But THIS BOOK, readers! This. Book.

First off, let me say that I bought this book like 5+ years ago. I have a problem, you see, and if it were neater, I would show you a picture of my bookshelf to illustrate just how big of a problem this is. But it is not neat, and therefore you shall not see it. Glad that’s out of the way.

I bought this book all those years ago because the description on the back reminded me of a BBC America original show that I loved called Copper, which was about an Irish policeman in New York just at the end of the Civil War. It was gritty and raw without being too bloody, and I fell in love with the characters. They were all complex and so very real.

So when I read the description on the back of Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye, I knew I had to read it. And in 2019 I finally did. It sucked me in from the first sentence. The narrator, Timothy Wilde, is a very honest narrator. He tells the reader like it is—his struggles with being an orphan, overshadowed by his charismatic older brother, and his opinion of the newly formed “copper stars” {aka, the NYPD}. But Tim gets recruited by his brother to join the copper stars, and that’s when a great and terrible mystery literally runs right into him.

I’m not going to tell you what the mystery is, but I will tell you that the way it ends…you’re not going to see it coming. I didn’t see it coming.

Faye’s writing is phenomenal. It is quite clear that she did an enormous amount of research before writing this book {it’s part of a series, too} without it being too heavy-handed. Sometimes authors make the factual information sound like a textbook entry, but not Faye.

And she is true to historical accuracies as well. In 1845, equality didn’t exist for some groups. She doesn’t pull any punches with that. And given that we are seeing this through the eyes of a policeman in the Five Points district of New York {aka, the worst part of NYC at the time}, well, nothing is rosy and sunshiny. There are some tough aspects of the story, but those aspects are true to the times.

If you have read or watched The Alienist, this is a pretty similar time period and tone. If you watched Copper, again, you’ll be very familiar with aspects of the world of the novel. Gangs of New York also takes place in the Five Points district.

On Goodreads, I gave this 5 stars. The other two books in the series are on their way to me from Thriftbooks. If you like historical fiction and you’re looking for something new to try, definitely give Gods of Gotham some serious consideration.

Oh, and there are newsies. They don’t sing or tap dance, but they’re there, doing fun newsie things...like putting on plays!!!! The fact that real-life newsies put on real-life plays, which does not come up at all in the real-life musical about real-life newsies going on a real-life strike, is a real-life tragedy.

Just saying.