Devotees of historical fiction will revel in Vicky Oliver’s novel, Firebrands, in which she gives readers a ring-side seat to a divided early 20th century Manhattan. The city’s undercurrent of discord is coming to a tipping point as the Gilded Age is about to be overtaken by the Progressive Age. Additionally in the early 1900s, the women’s movement was ascendant, the labor movement was about to blow up, and the anarchy movement was emerging.
While those living in lavish palaces on Millionaire’s Row were clinging to their opulent lifestyles, factory workers were sleeping 10 to a room and working excruciatingly long hours under inhumane conditions.
The pronounced divisions in the city are palpable to the central character, Helena James, whose circumstances lead her to become an impassioned activist for workers’ rights. Her younger sister, Summer, seeks a life of wealth and comfort and has become engaged to the millionaire owner of a union-busting organization. In Helena’s fervent attempt to stop her sister’s wedding, she sets out to investigate the labor spy kingpin’s business dealings and experiences for herself the enforced brutality.
But Summer believes her marriage will save their penniless parents from ruin. She’s also willing to overlook her fiancé’s shady business dealings in exchange for a life of luxury. Through the resolves of the two sisters, Firebrands characterizes the opposing forces pitting one faction against another during these socially and economically charged times.
Helena has been active in her city’s marches and rallies on behalf of women’s rights. Her advocacy experience emboldens her to champion the rights of workers, which becomes a far more dangerous undertaking.
In her valiant effort to protect her impressionable young sister from marriage to a malicious brute, Helena stops at nothing, including disguising herself to infiltrate a gentlemen’s private club and embedding herself in a sweat shop. Intent on her mission, she schemes against the injustices wrought on the laborers. The compelling story incorporates riveting suspense and enthralling intrigue to expose readers to early industrialization’s dark side.
Through her ploys, the feisty, if not reckless, Helena takes readers from grand uptown parlors to run-down tenements, from plush gentlemen’s clubs to steamy factories floors, and from women’s rights marches along city streets to clandestine union organizing meetings in secretive spaces. Altogether, Firebrands convincingly captures the sweep of New York’s raucous and divided city.
Vicky Oliver, who lives in Manhattan, has relatives from both sides of her family who lived and worked in the city during the period in which Firebrands is set. Oliver was drawn to write about these times because of its pivotal place in history, incorporating the end of an inherently unjust era and the beginning of another poised to address the flagrant inequalities. She weaves in the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory catastrophe to punctuate how activism is often the harbinger of an urgent need for change.
Vicky Oliver’s Firebrands engages readers with period-specific insights, but in the vein of truly compelling historical fiction invites them to personalize the past and gives them universal messages upon which to ponder.
Firebrands is now available on Amazon
