By the Rivers of Brooklyn.

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

It is 1930, and Rose Evans is “a thousand miles from home, in Brooklyn, New York, where she has always wanted to be. But now she knows that even Brooklyn is not really far enough; it is full of little pockets, little holes you can fall down and find yourself back home, or someplace too much like it.” Rose is, along with her brothers, Jim and Bert, one of more than 75,000 Newfoundlanders who moved to Brooklyn in the 1920s in search of work and what they thought would be a more prosperous lifestyle. As we follow them, and two generations of their offspring, in their struggle to adapt and in their attempts to assume a new identity against the powerful impulse to retain the old; as we live through their ambitions and tragedies, and travel back to St. John’s (where the parents and a sister still reside) to refresh their spirits; and, as we share their happiness and sorrow, we too become part of the emigrant experience. For Morgan-Cole is not an exceptionally fine writer, but invests her story with such authenticity of detail, and such strongly-defined characters, that the reader is able, as readers of all good novels should, to enter the world she has created.