- Paperback: 232 pages
- Publisher: iUniverse (22 Jun 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0595454127
- ISBN-13: 978-0595454129
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
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Product Description
Product Description
Throughout the ages, small children have scratched out a living working at difficult and dangerous jobs. When she makes a speech acknowledging her promotion to the position of Judge of Orphans, lawyer Mary Rose Cabrini captures the attention of a mysterious child named Joseph Di Buonna who begs her for help in pursuing the truth about his family. The boy's tale stretches beyond his own generation back to gas-lit New York City and an era in which every child of the street had to fend for himself against starvation, filth, nosey do-gooders, other street children, cops, truant officers . Mary Rose discovers that, conquering all, Joseph's ancestors did manage to pass down the secret legacy of his family. Has the hour finally come for Joseph to claim what is rightfully his? Or is Mary Rose being tricked by a clever child capable of leading her into a trap of deceit, disgrace and ultimately-death?
About the Author
Award-winning novelist Rosemary Aubert authored the Ellis Portal mysteries, published around the world. She has scoured archives, libraries and the streets of New York and Toronto seeking stories of immigrant adventurers like her own ancestors. She was born in Niagara Falls, N.Y. and lives, writes and teaches in Ontario, Canada.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Boy with a Harp
29 May 2008
Format:Paperback
Author of the award-winning Ellis Portal series, a milestone in Canadian crime writing, Rosemary Aubert returns not only to Toronto but to New York City for this historical saga.
Poised to assume the evocative title of Judge of Orphans, lawyer Mary Rose Cabrini finds herself pursed by a small boy whose case she has been ordered to investigate. Though all seems well on the surface with the boy's custodial grandparents, murky problems about his lineage soon emerge. Cabrini follows her suspicions to New York. The tale stretches back generations to nineteenth-century Gotham, where an Italian patriarch commands a group of street children who sing and play music to survive. Is the old man a Fagin or a kindly Godfather in this brutal era?
The story moves with seamless narrative skill from the distant past to the near past to the present, with Cabrini and the boy at the hub. Colourful characters lodge in the imagination, like Billbone, the troll, and Madonna of the monkey room, dwellers in the netherworld. A meticulous researcher into the history of her own family and other Italian immigrants, Aubert sets the scene with commanding detail: "There were only four windows on each floor of the tenement, no air-shafts, no ventilators. The air in the narrow unlighted stairwell smelled of dust, urine, tomato paste, animal dung, coal smoke and burning human flesh. It was no worse than the smell of horses in the street, of saliva baked onto the sidewalk, the smell of clothes and hair never washed, the smell of bad meat roasted outside all year long. The boy was used to the smells, but he didn't think he could ever get used to the cries that filled the whole dank building, the cries of screaming monkeys, and screaming children, too."
The pace increases as Cabrini is charged with a crime and must flee New York, where she is on the verge of discovering a dangerous truth. She returns to Toronto to enlist the aid of a lawyer. At the pinnacle of her career, could disbarment now face her? What fragile clues have survived the ages to weave these disparate people into a single tapestry with a background of a multi-million-dollar crime?
In a charming thematic parallel, the name of the lead character not only echoes Rosemary's but the Mother Cabrini Shrine, located beyond the foothills of Golden, Colorado, established to spread the gospel and provide a peaceful summer atmosphere for orphan children.
Poised to assume the evocative title of Judge of Orphans, lawyer Mary Rose Cabrini finds herself pursed by a small boy whose case she has been ordered to investigate. Though all seems well on the surface with the boy's custodial grandparents, murky problems about his lineage soon emerge. Cabrini follows her suspicions to New York. The tale stretches back generations to nineteenth-century Gotham, where an Italian patriarch commands a group of street children who sing and play music to survive. Is the old man a Fagin or a kindly Godfather in this brutal era?
The story moves with seamless narrative skill from the distant past to the near past to the present, with Cabrini and the boy at the hub. Colourful characters lodge in the imagination, like Billbone, the troll, and Madonna of the monkey room, dwellers in the netherworld. A meticulous researcher into the history of her own family and other Italian immigrants, Aubert sets the scene with commanding detail: "There were only four windows on each floor of the tenement, no air-shafts, no ventilators. The air in the narrow unlighted stairwell smelled of dust, urine, tomato paste, animal dung, coal smoke and burning human flesh. It was no worse than the smell of horses in the street, of saliva baked onto the sidewalk, the smell of clothes and hair never washed, the smell of bad meat roasted outside all year long. The boy was used to the smells, but he didn't think he could ever get used to the cries that filled the whole dank building, the cries of screaming monkeys, and screaming children, too."
The pace increases as Cabrini is charged with a crime and must flee New York, where she is on the verge of discovering a dangerous truth. She returns to Toronto to enlist the aid of a lawyer. At the pinnacle of her career, could disbarment now face her? What fragile clues have survived the ages to weave these disparate people into a single tapestry with a background of a multi-million-dollar crime?
In a charming thematic parallel, the name of the lead character not only echoes Rosemary's but the Mother Cabrini Shrine, located beyond the foothills of Golden, Colorado, established to spread the gospel and provide a peaceful summer atmosphere for orphan children.
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