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FindingJane
Jul 07, 2017FindingJane rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This fictionalized account of a true historical figure rings with verve, danger, solid characterization. The author has fleshed out and teased forth this story and padded it with well-imagined dialogue. It is also a fine microscope on early 20th-century living in America. This is a novel of immigrants, vagrants, criminals, workers, fallen women, lost children, city life and farm existence. The sisters Kopp are formidable women, even the seemingly flighty Fleurette. When they band together, you see the fierce love that lies between them as well as the arguments that manage to reveal the close ties binding them. When they get embroiled with the vicious and amoral Henry Kaufmann, their bonds are tested but ultimately hold firm. Henry is that kind of villain you truly despise. Having attempted to kill his own brother when he was only five, he’s only worsened with time and age. He’s grown more cunning but holds petty grudges and cannot bear slights. He keeps the worse kind of company and has let the mechanisms of his father’s business slide because he prefers foolish and hair-brained schemes to actual industry. There’s nothing appealing about him and you yearn for him to meet his just desserts. Because this basic indecency makes him a one-dimensional character, the author wisely spends little time on him and his cronies, choosing instead to show us the mundane workings of the Kopp sisters. In a time when single women must marry, catch a husband or remain dependent on male relatives, Constance Kopp chooses differently. She mightily resists her brother’s constant urgings for her to live in his household, where she and her sisters would wind up becoming nothing more than shriveled aunts performing minor household chores and becoming little more than beggars at the table. Yet Constance yearns for more than the hardscrabble existence of the dwindling farm on which she and her sisters reside. Ms. Stewart takes us deep into Constance’s thoughts so that we understand the powerful drives she has to be independent, hard working and yet longing for the comfort of big-city life. The gap between her wishes and her life holds no problem for Constance. This novel is a thrilling detective story and a feminist tract set before women received the vote. Constance Kopp is a female protagonist of unusual strength, depth and (dare I say it?) height and you cheer for her all the way.