When the World Was Young

May 26, 2014
Gaffney’s affecting second novel (after Metropolis) charts the changing physical and emotional landscape of Brooklyn (and America) from WWII into the Korean War era, through a young girl’s coming-of-age. Wally Baker’s world revolves around her high-spirited mother, Stella, a doctor who gave up her profession for motherhood. Other important people in Wally’s life include her maternal grandparents, Gigi and Waldo, who live with them in their Brooklyn Heights apartment; Gigi’s African-American live-in maid, Loretta; and Loretta’s son, Ham. Wally can’t quite understand why her friendship with Ham so often arouses disapproval from outsiders. Two conspicuous absences are Wally’s father, who’s away at war, and her brother, Georgie, who died at age four. When a new boarder, mathematician Bill Niederman, arrives, Wally and Ham initially suspect him of being a spy. He becomes, however, a supportive father figure for Wally, helping with homework and encouraging her insatiable interest in the natural world. Wally’s stable existence ends after her mother’s death on V-J Day, marking the start of her journey into the uncertainty of post-WWII America. Themes of race, identity, and finding one’s personal destiny within societal expectations are all explored in this layered, delicate novel. Agent: Leigh Feldman, Leigh Feldman Literary.

June 1, 2014
A 9-year-old Brooklyn Heights girl picks up some hard lessons about fidelity, race and family after World War II in this lively sophomore effort from Gaffney (Metropolis, 2005).Conventional wisdom dictates that American society in the years immediately after World War II was highly segregated and built on traditional nuclear families. Gaffney is determined to unsettle those assumptions by focusing her story on Wally, a girl whose home life is decidedly complicated. As the story opens on V-J Day, Wally's father is stationed overseas while her mother, a doctor, has taken in a boarder with a mysterious government job. Wally loves her grandmother, who lives nearby, but the girl feels closer to Loretta, grandma's black maid, and Ham, the mixed-race boy Loretta is raising as her son. Wally and Ham are the stars of the story, and if their dual obsession with ant farms is a bit metaphorically on-the-nose for a story about postwar society, Gaffney does a fine job of showing how they grow wise and slightly jaded as they experience more of the adult world. The two absorb racist taunts, dig up some family secrets and discover how easily apparently stable relationships can come undone. (The boarder Wally's mom took in, for instance, was more than just a boarder.) The novel pivots on a tragedy in Wally's life that occurred on V-J Day, and Gaffney expertly moves back and forth in time to show how much more sophisticated Wally becomes about that event as she reaches college age. A personal crisis involving Ham after he serves in the Korean War is relatively underdrawn, but it bolsters Gaffney's thesis that America's midcentury patriotism covered up plenty of emotional wreckage. None of it would work, though, without the strong central figure of Wally, an inquisitive child who becomes a world-wise spitfire.A smart coming-of-age tale that upends a raft of Greatest Generation cliches.

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July 1, 2014

Gaffney's (Metropolis) coming-of-age story of Wally Baker, a precocious girl from a family of doctors in Brooklyn Heights, opens with the celebration of V-J Day when she is nine. Wally suffers a hard loss and grows up with burning questions about what happened to her mother. Yet under the strong influence of her accomplished grandmother, she continues to work at her science studies and goes to college; meanwhile Ham, the son of her grandparents' black housekeeper, fights in the Korean War, and when he returns, he and Wally have a romantic attraction to confront. VERDICT This compelling family drama features an intriguing cast of characters who are well drawn and realistic, while also being emblematic of their time. Gaffney's writing is graceful and leisurely paced, flavored with nostalgia. The story flows more smoothly in the second half when Wally has become a young woman. Recommended for those who like historical fiction that centers on women's lives.--Sonia Reppe, Stickney-Forest View P.L., IL

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2014
Metropolis (2005), Gaffney's ambitious first novel of old New York, stars a girl gangster. In her second, more concentrated and nuanced book, set in Brooklyn Heights during WWII and the Korean War, Gaffney tells the story of Metropolis'clever thief-turned-doctor's great-granddaughter, smart and earnest tomboy Wally, who worships Wonder Woman and whose aptitude for science is manifest in an ardor for ants. Her stern grandmother, ensconced in a grand old mansion, chooses to believe that Wally will outgrow her bug stage and become the fourth woman doctor in their family, though Wally's mother, Stella, was never certified. With her father serving in the Pacific, a mysterious boarder sharing their home, and a tragedy striking her unbalanced mother, Wally depends on longtime African American housekeeper Loretta for love and Loretta's artistic son, Ham, for companionship. This coheres into a charming and incisive tale about a brainy girl's metamorphosis into a heroically forthright woman, in which Gaffney asks provocative questions about parenthood, gender and racial prejudice, sexual magnetism, painful sacrifices and secrets, and profound heartbreak, all exacerbated by war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)