Hazel Gaynor is an author and freelance writer. In March 2009, after a fifteen-year career in corporate training and development, Hazel swapped the boardroom for the kitchen table, where she has been writing ever since. Originally from Yorkshire, England, she now lives in Ireland with her husband, two children, and an accident-prone cat. This is her first novel. Contact Hazel on Twitter @HazelGaynor or visit her online at HazelGaynor.com.
Inspired by true events, the New York Times bestselling novel The Girl Who Came Home is the poignant story of a group of Irish emigrants aboard RMS Titanic—a seamless blend of fact and fiction that explores the tragedy's impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. Ireland, 1912. Fourteen members of a small village set sail on RMS Titanic, hoping to find a better life in America. For seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy, the journey is bittersweet. Though her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in Ireland with Séamus, the sweetheart she left behind. When disaster strikes, Maggie is one of the lucky few passengers in steerage who survives. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that terrible night ever again. Chicago, 1982. Adrift after the death of her father, Grace Butler struggles to decide what comes next. When her Great Nana Maggie shares the painful secret she harbored for almost a lifetime about the Titanic, the revelation gives Grace new direction—and leads her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those they thought lost long ago.
I really wish I loved this story more. I do love and appreciate how Gaynor pays homage to so many real survivors of the Titanic. Much of the story is constructed from real-life details, such as a group of Irish emigrants boarding the Titanic together, to the telling of the story after the fact. Titanic aficionados will also recognize some of Titanic's most infamous personages, such as Mr. Ismay, Mr. Andrews, and Captain Smith, on the pages of this story. The Girl Who Came Home relies very heavily on the fact that it's a Titanic story, so I think that people who genuinely love engaging with this type of media will find the read pleasurable.
However, I felt like Gaynor only scratched the surface of the potential that existed. She creates a large cast of characters—my favorites being the main character, Maggie, while on board the ship; Lucky Harry, the third-class steward; and Frances, who is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her sister in New York—who each have very interesting and compelling backstories. Gaynor doesn't dive deep into their motivations, into why these characters need to be brought to the page, so at the very end of the novel, I was incredibly unsatisfied with where each of these characters ended up. I also felt like I wasn't invested in each of the characters the way I could have been. Because the cast was so large, I wasn't able to get attached to any to care about what happened to them, and thus was unimpressed by the ending. Spreading the cast so wide, also, helped me guess the "big reveal" of the ending about halfway through the book, which also is an unsatisfying feeling.
When you read a Titanic story, you automatically know that thousands of people won't survive, and so the characters you get to learn and know are immediately at risk. That's just the way it is. However, Gaynor laid all her cards out at the beginning. Maggie explicitly states that she's the only one who doesn't survive. While that later becomes untrue, starting the story off in this way immediately shuts out any reader's desire to get too attached. Knowing that none of them were going to survive didn't make me invested in them, and so the emotional punch of the story—the fact that some of Maggie's friends did, indeed, survive—didn't land. This was incredibly disheartening, because I found that Frances's storyline could have been more emotional, as could Harry's, but because of the set-up, I couldn't find it in myself to be as upset as I could have had it been written differently.
I also had trouble rectifying Grace's story to the whole of it. It was very jarring to jump between the story of Maggie's Titanic, and then Grace's more modern woes. This is especially true because, like many of the other characters, we don't really get deep into Grace's character. Everything was surface level, especially here. I often had trouble matching the past Maggie with Grace's version of Maggie, as well. When we didn't even get to read Grace's article, I knew there was a disconnect in the way this story was told, and that no part of it reached its full potential.
While potentially enjoyable for those who love to engage with Titanic media, I found The Girl Who Came Home to be underwhelming, and just not ready for the world to see. It had so much potential, and had it been able to reach it, this book would have been fantastic.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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