Mimi Malloy, At Last!: A Novel
Three generations of an Irish American family come to life in MacDonnell’s humorous and poignant novel, a family anchored now by Mimi Malloy of Quincy, Massachusetts, the oldest of four sisters still living. Mimi loves her smokes, her nightly Manhattan, and, lately, the companionship of her apartment super. Her life seems to be running smoothly, if uneventfully, other than her oldest daughter’s worrying about her mother’s increasingly  frequent memory lapses. Then suddenly  “the questionnaire” arrives, a genealogy project sent to all the sisters from one of the grandkids, and Mimi’s memories gradually surface, piece by piece, revealing the sisters’ long-suppressed abuse at the hands of their stepmother, how their beloved Da looked the other way, and what really happened to their youngest sister, who was mysteriously “sent away.”  MacDonnell captures perfectly the family dynamics between sisters, mothers, and daughters, as if she were sitting in on their gab sessions, taking copious notes. For readers who enjoy Maeve Binchy and Rosamunde Pilcher, this is a highly engaging family chronicle, with a healthy dose of Irish history laced in as well. --Deborah Donovan