In this compelling, richly researched novel, author Andrew Joyce tells a story of determination and grit as the Mahoney clan fights to gain a foothold in America. From the first page to the last, fans of Edward Rutherfurd and W. Michael Gear will enjoy this riveting, historically accurate tale of adventure, endurance, and hope.
In the second year of an Gorta Mhór—the Great … hope.
In the second year of an Gorta Mhór—the Great Famine—nineteen-year-old Devin Mahoney lies on the dirt floor of his small, dark cabin. He has not eaten in five days. His only hope of survival is to get to America, the land of milk and honey. After surviving disease and storms at sea that decimate crew and passengers alike, Devin’s ship limps into New York Harbor three days before Christmas, 1849. Thus starts an epic journey that will take him and his descendants through one hundred and fourteen years of American history, including the Civil War, the Wild West, and the Great Depression.
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As of fan of Joyce’s western-themed novels, I couldn’t wait to read this book! “Mahoney,” chronicles the lives of three generations of men detailing the trials and tribulations of their father-son relationships bound together by a proud Irish heritage.
Part one delves into Devin Mahoney’s story. The reader learns how he immigrated from Ireland to the United States to escape the potato famine. From the perils of the ship crossing to his escape off the death ship, Devin finds America full of discrimination against his Irish heritage. Times are tough, but Devin has the drive of ten men. He vows to become a success in this new land.
Andrew Joyce depicts the details of Devin’s journey with precision and skill, leaving nothing to the imagination. Be prepared for your senses to explode from the detailed descriptions. I found many of these chapters emotionally charged and filled with some of Joyce’s best writing to date.
I must add that the use of Epistolary communication in this section is one of my favorite literary forms. Joyce spares no emotions in his raw depictions of the Civil War.
Part two shares the life of Dillon, Devon’s son who sets out on a journey to the American West. What he finds is every young man’s dream. He joins a cattle drive as a cook and learns how to become a cowboy. Eventually, he takes on the title of U.S. Marshall – even hunting down a few criminals. In California, Dillon strikes it big in the oil business.
In part three, we meet David Mahoney, a spoiled, self-centered young man, the product of his father’s and grandfather’s successes. David’s story holds the most hope as the reader witnesses his collapse into poverty. In many ways, David ends up where his grandfather began. David is forced to grapple with the realities of life in the 1920s. From the soup lines of the Great Depression to the racial strife of the deep South, David finds himself and the soul of the Mahoney clan.
Joyce produces strong characters with dialog that plunks the reader into the middle of the action. Also, look for the many historical references liberally sprinkled throughout this novel. As a nation built from the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants, this book should remind us all of who we are as Americans.
There are an estimated 76 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry with around 42 million in the United States. I am one of those with origins in County Cork at the time of the Great Famine.
This makes Mahoney a must read for all whose roots lie in this small island republic with only a population of 4.5 million today. The first chapters are chilling as we read of the devastating famine, and the treatment by the British, of the already impoverished Irish in those years. But it does lay the foundation for the story that follows, and demonstrates the courage, perseverance and creativity required to start a new life from scratch.
A new life of opportunity was promised in a land that was still in its infancy. Getting there in a Coffin Ship was hazardous. Setting foot in the new land was almost as tough as the one left behind, especially if you were Irish. But you cannot keep a good man down, and Devin Mahoney, descended from the High Kings of Ireland, is such a man. He has to navigate the prejudice and poverty just for the privilege of taking the lowest paid and most back-breaking work, building the new nation’s infrastructure that is about to be torn apart by civil war. We relive those desperate years through Devin’s letters home to his wife as he continues to fight against injustice.
In part two of Mahoney, we meet Dillon who carries the same determination and drive to succeed as his father. The vastness of America beckons and over the following years, Dillon explores the west and experiences the life of a cowboy and gunslingers, before heading to California in search of his fortune.
In part three, the next generation of Mahoneys is in the hands of David. Having been raised with plenty, he finds it hard to relate to his heritage, preferring to immerse himself in the pre-crash high life in New York. But all good things come to an end, and that is when the Mahoney blood within his veins is needed to bring him redemption and new path in life.
The book was riveting from start to finish, painstakingly researched, with wonderfully developed characters that are fascinating to walk beside. There is sorrow and anger at the deprivation, but deep respect for those who are forced to leave their homes to find sanctuary, and a safe place to bring up their families. Not just from Europe but those suffering from prejudice and deprivation in the deep south of America. There is plenty of adventure as well as interesting secondary characters, both good and evil, to keep your attention.
I highly recommend that you read the book and for just a few minutes, imagine your own family history, and how your ancestors overcame their struggles to enable you to enjoy all that you have today.
I read this book via an ARC from the author, for Rosie Amber’s Book Review Team. The fact that it was free has not affected the content of this honest review.
I adore family sagas through the generations, and have a great interest in American history of the last two hundred years, so I leapt on this book when I saw it on the review team list.
The book is split into three sections: Devin, the 19 year old from Ireland eager to make his fortune in America, his son, Dillon, who sets out to travel west, and David, the privileged son of Dillon, whose fortunes take a different turn during the Depression.
I’ll start by saying that a great strength of this book is the dialogue, which never falters in its quality, and is the main reason why the characterisation is so good. I was also most impressed by the research that had gone into the book; it is clear, throughout, that Mr Joyce has a great understanding of the peoples of each time and place in the novel.
I adored the first part, about Devin; I looked forward to getting back to it each time I had to put it down. Devin’s route to America is depicted so colourfully that I was completely engrossed. I was disappointed when his section ended; I wanted to carry on reading about him. I liked the next part, about Dillon’s adventures in ‘Wild West’ Wyoming, but, although the book continued to be well-written, admirably researched, and flowed so well, I was less convinced by Dillon as a character.
My interested was piqued again by the start of David’s section – I loved reading about the spoilt, self-centred young man who cared nothing for his family or the struggles lived through by his father and grandfather. His first experiences as the Depression hit kept me engrossed, too, but after he changed his way of thinking, I became less convinced by him. I think what I was not so keen on was the way in which Dillon and David kept bumping into strangers, on the road and in bars, and everywhere else, who offered them the chance to change their lives for the better. Devin’s life seemed more realistic, whereas Dillon and David appeared to fall into one piece of great luck after another. I was also less keen on David’s section because so much of it was dialogue-led, which is not a preference of mine; this is not a criticism, just a personal preference.
Despite the aspects about which I wasn’t so sure, it’s a most entertaining book. I think it has real value as a fictional history of America the period between 1846 – the 1930s, even if I felt some of it was rushed through; there is a lot of material for one novel. Mr Joyce can certainly write; I have just downloaded another of his books, Resolution. I was also impressed by how he wrote Devin and David in the third person, but Dillon in the first; this was absolutely the right choice, and a clever one.
I’d most certainly recommend this novel for lovers of family sagas through the ages, particularly if you have an interest in American history.
The term epic can be tossed around these days a little too loosely. This book is epic. The author has crafted a tale that encompasses some of the most significant events of the past 200 years. This is done so with incredible detail but not at the expense of character development.
The reader is drawn in and feels deeply for Devin Mahoney and his struggle for life itself and a future in America. Then the reader is drawn deeply into caring for Dillon. The reader is taken for a long thoughtful journey with David. Three generations of one incredible family brought to life by the stunning writing quality found in a book that could sit next to the works of Herman Wouk with pride.
If you long for a classic that tells a story the way the great authors of the last 200 years did it, this is the one for you. 5+ stars isn’t enough. This is one impressive tome that deserves serious consideration to be made into a miniseries. One of the best books in the 21st century and deserves consideration as one of the best books ever written.
My Rating: 5+ stars
“Devin Mahoney, the descendant of kings, lay on the dirt floor of his small, dark cabin, waiting for Death to take him by the hand and lead him out of this world of misery.”
It’s not exactly the first line of Andrew Joyce’s new generational saga Mahoney, but I’m betting it was the one he wrote first. Mahoney is a coming of age story in three parts, both for the three generations of an Irish immigrant family it encompasses, and even more for America, the country they help to shape.
When we meet Devin Mahoney in Part One of the saga, he’s dying of hunger during Ireland’s potato famine, probably around 1846. The mixture of absentee landlords, repressive taxes, and remnants of feudal land systems combines with crop failure to create a perfect storm of economic devastation. Devin has already lost his family to the rampaging diseases of the workhouse when the landlord’s agent informs him he’s being evicted from his family farm and sent to America.
The nineteen-year-old’s journey across the ravaged landscape of Ireland, followed by the horrific passage on a ‘coffin ship’ are personal glimpses into the slow-moving train wreck that was Ireland. Devin’s determination to return to his homeland as a rich man after making his fortune among the supposed ‘streets paved with gold’ in America slowly matures into a resolve to make a life for himself and his young family in the new land. In the best generational saga tradition, Devin’s life in America is a clean slate, written in a new country.
Devin Mahoney arrives at a pivotal moment in the history of the young United States. Through hard work, he builds a life and home in America. He becomes a husband and a father. But Devin remembers the virtual slavery of his youth, and feels he owes it to the past and his dead family in Ireland, as well as the future and his new family in America, to join the fight against slavery when the country heads into Civil War.
Part Two takes up the tale of Dillon Mahoney, Devin’s son. If Part One resonates with my own family history, it’s in Part Two that Andrew Joyce settles into his comfort zone, writing confidently about a western landscape and period he’s researched extensively and knows intimately. While Dillon’s father’s story was of America on the brink of Civil War, the son’s tale embraces that most pivotal of American self images, the Wild West. Never mind that the actual “wild west” only lasted about thirty years (roughly 1865-1895). Revolvers were newfangled inventions that only were accurate to about 50 feet, and (at least in the earlier models) would burn the shooter’s hands. The famous Shootout at the OK Corral occurred when Sheriff Virgil Earp, along with his deputized brothers and Doc Holliday, enforced Tombstone’s anti-gun ordinance. The only things that occurred less frequently than shoot-outs were bank robberies—probably less than ten across that period.But even though history (and Hollywood) got so much of it wrong, there’s still something compelling about that period that defined so much of what we Americans believe ourselves to be—adventurous, brave, and entitled as hell.
It would have been easy for author Joyce to plunk his young hero down in the middle of the stereotype: the cowboy on a cattle drive, the quick-draw sheriff in gun duels with bank robbers and cattle rustlers. But unlike his father’s story, Dillon’s tale is told in the first person, offering readers an intimate look at the next pivotal period in America history, the westward expansion. Hearing Dillon’s voice and sharing his thoughts both makes his story more immediate and compelling, and also keeps him from becoming another stereotypic hard-eyed hero of the Wild West.
[QUOTE:] “I looked down at my still-smoking gun as if I had never seen it before. ‘Keep ’em covered, Bob. I’ll be right back.’
Still holding my gun, on unsteady legs, I walked to the back of barn and emptied my gut, splashing my boots in the process.
On that fiery-hot day in the middle of nowhere, in a godforsaken patch of desert, I learned that it is not easy to kill a man. It’s not easy at all, even if the man needed killing.”[END QUOTE]
Dillon’s is the essential middle generation role, successful owner of his position in the world, fully assimilated and at home in a way his Irish immigrant father never could have been. At the same time, America as a country is coming of age, accepting and embracing its role in the world.
Part Three tells the story of Dillon’s son, David. In a generational saga, this third generation Mahoney’s rebellion against the preceding generation’s values and restrictions echoes his grandfather’s disgust with the past—a similarity only made possible by David’s confidence of belonging to his father’s world.
Again, this coming of age is an echo of America itself as it’s thrust from the glitter, self-satisfaction, and excesses of the 1920s into the grim reality of the Great Depression. In keeping with that loss of identity and confidence, David’s tale is again told in the third person, like that of his grandfather Devin. For example, David watches his world collapse after the stock market crash with the same fatalistic passivity as his grandfather lying on his dirt floor in Ireland waits for death. But David is also the product of his own father’s successful assimilation and confident place in his world. David’s encounters on the road, and especially with survivors of an actual horrific racial attack in Rosewood Florida, awaken the same disgust at injustice and determination to do something about it that connect him firmly to his father and grandfather. Or, as Dillon puts what is essentially the theme of the book,
“If good men don’t stand up to evil, the bad men will win, and this land will never be tamed.”
David, the grandson of immigrant Irish Mahoneys, is a synthesis of the preceding two generations—a mirror of America’s own struggles to accept a place on the world stage while still coming to terms with a past and present that include slavery, discrimination, and intolerance.
Mahoney isn’t a perfect book. Having just three men embody a hundred years of history meant they had to do too much, be too many places, and sometimes coincidence seemed too forced. But if you look at it as a generational saga of an entire country, as viewed through a small intimate family mirror, the overall effect is mesmerizing.
I already knew Andrew Joyce as a terrific storyteller (in the best Irish tradition?), but in Mahoney I see him as a terrific writer as well, from the overarching vision to the minute details of the story. He gives just enough detail to allow readers to build a scene in our own mind, while allowing his characters to grow, to change, and to learn, and above all, to make their new land into a better place for those who follow.