On June 23, 1911—a summer day so magnificent it seems as if God himself has smiled on the town—Fall River, Massachusetts, is reveling in its success. The Cotton Centennial is in full swing as Joseph Bartlett takes his place among the local elite in the parade grandstand. The meticulously planned carnival has brought the thriving textile town to an unprecedented halt; rich and poor alike crowd the … the streets, welcoming President Taft to America’s “Spindle City.”
Yet as he perches in the grandstand nursing a nagging toothache, Joseph Bartlett straddles the divide between Yankee mill owners and the union bosses who fight them. Bartlett, a renegade owner, fears the town cannot long survive against the union-free South. He frets over the ever-present threat of strikes and factory fires, knowing his own fortune was changed by the drop of a kerosene lantern. When the Cleveland Mill burned, good men died, and immigrant’s son Joseph Bartlett gained a life of privilege he never wanted.
Now Joseph is one of the most influential men in a prosperous town. High above the rabble, as he stands among politicians and society ladies, his wife is dying, his sons are lost in the crowd facing pivotal decisions of their own, and the differences between the haves and have-nots are stretched to the breaking point.
Spindle City delves deep into the lives, loves, and fortunes of real and imagined mill owners, anarchists, and immigrants, from the Highlands mansions to the tenements of the Cogsworth slum, chronicling a mill town’s—and a generation’s—last days of glory.
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Took a long time to figure out the characters. The first third of the book was totally lost to me.
Interesting look back in time if you like history you will enjoy it
I’m not sure how I feel about this book. I am from Fall River. My father worked in the mills in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s when the Pepperell Mill moved South. He worked in a number of other mills through the 60’s and 70’s when he retired.
Not entirely what I expected but a very good read. I am from Fall River, MA and my father worked in the mills as a loom fixer and my mother worked in the shops so it was all very relevant to me. I personally knew all the places they talked about. So glad I read it.
I found the book very slow. Lots of characters to follow; I felt their “stories” were incomplete.
In Spindle City, a delicately embroidered novel stitched with intrigue, author Jotham Burrello reimagines the early twentieth-century heyday of Fall River, Massachusetts, through the rise and fall of textile manufacturer Joseph Bartlett — a man beset by two wayward sons, the winds of labor agitation, and a secret he carries like a millstone. From the Portuguese laborers on the shop floors to the Yankee Brahmins in the city’s exclusive Highlands, Burrello captures the bustling spirit, complex social mores, and cutthroat underbelly of a lost world with a pitch-perfect ear and a generous heart. For those who enjoy their literary fiction with a historical weave, Spindle City rivals the best of E. L. Doctorow or A. S. Byatt. A stunning, stylish debut from an author who has mastered both the nuances of William Howard Taft’s America and the intricacies of the human condition.
With Spindle City, Jotham Burrello sets himself the seemingly impossible task of anatomizing pre-World War I America through the prism of a single mill town — and succeeds resoundingly. This portrait of desires and discontents radiating outward from the poorest families to titans of wealth recalls Ragtime in its sweep and brings our past to achingly present life.
In Spindle City, New England of a century ago is reborn a riot of cotton bales and quahog bushels, toboggan rides and Model Ts. Whether we find ourselves amidst the euphoria of a city-wide carnival or within the hearts of his grieving, striving characters, Jotham Burrello isolates, in the particularities of this lost world, timeless lessons about loyalty, ambition, and human resilience. A roaring debut.
In the grand tradition of E. L. Doctorow and Paula McLain, Jotham Burello’s assured debut novel blends historical reality with invention as he creates textile mill owner Joseph Bartlett, who stands astride a world on the narrow edge of dangerous change. Even as Bartlett revels in his prosperity, he mourns his dying wife, and as union agitators are pitted against bosses, his sons are overtaken by the horrors of World War I. What could be a catalog of momentous events springs to life as Burrello infuses his characters with passion and humanity.
Love, friendship, thievery, abuse, robber barons, rotten teeth, the smell of hot nuts at a summer parade, and the decline of the great New England textile mills: Spindle City has it all. A delight to the intellect, the emotions, and the senses.
This novel is set in 1911 Fall River, Massachusetts, a textile mill town celebrating its one hundredth anniversary with a visit from President Taft. The story revolves around Joseph Bartlett, a mill owner, and his family’s struggles.
This book had so much potential but fell short on so many levels.
First, because of its setting, it is supposedly a historical, but Burrello fails to bring the history to life, instead he tells about the history – the abysmal working conditions in the mills and the tenements where the mill workers live, but he doesn’t show the reader thus depriving the reader of the sense of place and time.
Second, Burrello’s character development is weak. While he introduces a plethora of characters in the early pages of the book, doesn’t flesh them out there. The reader has no opportunity to know his characters as the story begins to unfold. Later, when the story does get going, there’s nothing to distinguish one character from another because Burrello failed to make his characters come alive for the reader when he introduced them. Outside of the female millworkers and wives, there are few women characters. Burrello introduces a union organizer and just as you begin to like her, she disappears from the book.
There are other issues with the writing but the two above are enough to make readers stop reading and go on to the next book on their to-be-read list.
My thanks to Blackstone Publishing and Edelweiss for an eARC.