Banished Children of Eve Author:Peter Quinn Banished Children of Eve, a novel of America struggling to become a melting pot, marks the debut of a gifted storyteller. — It is New York City, the time of the Civil War. The war has just entered its third bloody year, and the North is about to impose its first military draft, a decision that will spark the most devastating and... more » destructive riot in American history.
Quinn gives us these events through the eyes of people drawn from every part of the city's life -- minstrels, street gangs, servants, soldiers and clergymen, Yankee, African American, and Irish. It is the New York of Jimmy Dunne, a streetwise Irish-American hustler in search of the big score. Of Eliza, an African-American actress seeking her place in a city where her family has lived since colonial times. Of Jack Mulch, Eliza's lover, who escaped death in the Irish famine of the 1840's, and is struggling to hold on to his position as one of New York's leading minstrels.
At the heart of Banished Children of Eve in the American search for the Promised Land. Along with Jimmy, Eliza, and Jack, it is a search shared by Charles Bedford, a scheming and ambitious stockbroker, and by Margaret O'Driscoll, an immigrant servant girl in Bedford's home. There are two other shadowy presences, One is a drunken and broken drifter,S Stephen Foster, who has given away all his songs, but can still remember the music, which becomes music of the novel. The other is the Civil War itself.
Throughout the stories of these disparate lives, all brought together in the cataclysm of the Draft Riots, Quinn spins out the fates of his rich and vital characters as he brings magically to life a pivotal period in the country's history.« less