Land of Dreams
The third book in the trilogy that began with Ellis Island and continued with City of Hope, Land of Dreams opens with Ellie Hogan leading a quiet life with her young son Tom on Fire Island, New York. There’s a disconnect here, since Ellie – last seen heading up a Depression-era refuge for the homeless – is now a successful artist, a development I didn’t see shadowed in the earlier books. The idyll is swiftly interrupted by the news that Ellie’s older son Leo has run away from school, heading for Hollywood. Fearing the worst, Ellie follows him, and makes a home in Los Angeles with Tom and Bridie, her elderly Irish friend.
It’s a pity that the first hundred pages of Land of Dreams contain so much recapping of the previous novels, although Ellie’s history does go some way toward explaining the cynical, acidic tone she frequently adopts, illustrated best by her reaction to the efforts of a friend of a friend to show her hospitality in Chicago. Arriving in 1940s Los Angeles – nicely painted by Kerrigan, whose lyrical style is well suited to scene-setting – Ellie’s cynicism proves a good defense against the artificiality of the movie business, but readers may find her unlikable as she sets out to fix the lives of those around her whether they want it or not.
As Ellie suffers one defeat after another she finally comes to realize that she’s unable to control the destiny of others, and it’s at this point that Ellie’s story recovers the warmth and depth that made Ellis Island so compelling. This is not a straightforward trilogy, mostly due to the seismic shifts that Ellie’s life undergoes at intervals, but this third novel does, in the end, provide a resolution to an interesting Irish immigrant story.
