About the Book
Title: Decanted Truths
Author: Melanie Forde
Genre: Literary / Women’s Fiction / Family Saga
For Irish immigrant families like the Harrigans and Gavagans, struggle
has been the name of the game since they arrived in Boston in the nineteenth
century. For twice-orphaned Leah Gavagan, who comes of age in the Depression,
the struggle is compounded by bizarre visions that disrupt her daily life --
and sometimes come true. She has difficulty fitting in with her surroundings:
whether the lace-curtain Dorchester apartment overseen by her judgmental Aunt
Margaret or the wild Manomet bluff shared with her no-nonsense Aunt Theo and
brain-damaged Uncle Liam. A death in the family disrupts the tepid life path
chosen for Leah and sets her on a journey of discovery. That journey goes back
to the misadventures shaping the earlier generation, eager to prove its
hard-won American credentials in the Alaskan gold rush, the Spanish-American
War, and The Great War. She learns of the secrets that have bound Theo and
Margaret together. Ultimately, Leah learns she is not who she thought she was.
Her new truth both blinds and dazzles her, much like the Waterford decanter at
the center of her oldest dreams -- an artifact linking three Irish-American
families stumbling after the American Dream.
Author Bio
Raised in a Boston Irish family, Melanie Forde
knew her life was infinitely easier than that of her ancestors, refugees from the
Potato Famine. The storytelling skills of her elders kept ancestral triumphs
and tragedies alive, so that the Potato Famine and the Easter Rebellion felt as
real as the Cold War. Inheriting the storyteller gene, Ms. Forde is the author
of three earlier novels, her Hillwilla trilogy. She now lives far from her roots, on a
West Virginia farm. She still maintains a potato
patch—just in case.
Links
Book Excerpts
With The Dream’s first visit, [Leah] had no tools of interpretation. A
toddler … has no way of understanding the sensory input from deep within a
sailing vessel. It took years of dreaming, reading, and schooling to identify
the venue, to understand that great linen sails would snap in the wind, that
the wind itself often assumed a tormented human voice, that a wooden hull would
creak in protest against a rolling, pitching sea.
The Dream didn’t
have much of a plot but offered vignettes of life in steerage, from the
perspective of one specific passenger. Through his eyes, Leah saw care-worn
faces of all ages. The bodies supporting those faces were generally far too
thin and covered in shabby, soiled clothing. The garments suggested a different
era. Leah witnessed snippets of diverse human dramas: incipient love affairs,
marriages fraying under the stress of the ocean odyssey, the imminence of death
for some…
The passenger
sharing visions with the dreamer would retreat to a recess tucked behind a
hanging lantern. Leah eventually realized her guide was a boy. She never saw
his face, any more than she could see her own face without benefit of a mirror.
But she could see his short, thin limbs. Moreover, that recess appeared too
restricted to accommodate an adult. And from the dreamer’s early
twentieth-century perspective, the passenger’s odd-looking pants were a
reliable indicator of a male body underneath the cloth. Nor could Leah imagine
any female, even the most impoverished, putting up with such spectacularly ugly
shoes. In the privacy of his hidey hole, the boy would invariably remove his
boots briefly and rub his feet as if in pain. Naked, the right foot twisted
horribly inward. The deformity so repelled the young dreamer that she sometimes
would shake herself awake.
Eventually, she
realized the scary sight was worth tolerating. After the boy finished rubbing
his feet, his grubby fingers would reach for a burlap bag tucked even more
deeply into the recess. His hands would then extract something swathed in
oilcloth. Once unwrapped, the contents exploded with shards of lantern light in
a dizzying array of colors. Looking down at the object in the boy’s lap, Leah
could see his chest and belly expand briefly. Then those small hands would
rewrap the light-filled wonder in the filthy oilcloth and return it to the
burlap sack. With a shove from his good foot, he would push the bag deeper into
the ship’s cavity.
The hidden object
filled the darkest corners of the dreamer’s soul with light. With beauty. With
hope. It stirred every corpuscle in her blood.
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