The crazyladies of Pearl Street
Subtitle: a novel
By: Trevanian
Publisher: Random House Large Print
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: [text (large print)] /
Number of pages: 640
ISBN-13: 9780375434952
Subjects: Boys; Fatherless families; Irish American women; Eccentrics and eccentricities; Single mothers; Slums; Fiction
Description: The place is Albany, New York. The year is 1936. Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and their spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned--again--by his father, a charmer and a con artist. With no money and no family willing to take them in, the LaPointes manage to create a fragile nest at 238 North Pearl Street. For the next eight years, through the Great Depression and Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, with its ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. As Jean-Luc discovers, it's a neighborhood of "crazyladies": Miss Cox, the feared and ridiculed teacher who ignites his imagination; Mrs. Kane, who runs a beauty parlor/fortune-telling salon in the back of her husband's grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War; and Jean-Luc's own unconventional, vivacious mother.