A scrap of coloured fabric connects the tragic events of
September eleventh in New York with the Triangle Shirtwaist
fire over a hundred years ago.
In A FALL OF MARIGOLDS, Taryn runs a textile store in
Manhattan where she has managed to bury her memories of
surviving the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.
She has a little daughter in school now and life is busy.
A different picture of New York emerges when we look
through the eyes of Clara from Pennsylvania working on
Ellis Island. As a nurse, she cares for the polyglot
immigrants being examined and quarantined on the doorstep
of the city. In August 1911, she still carries nightmares
of the industrial accident in the garment district which
she had survived, when 147 employees died.
The immigrants have a heartbreaking life, for not only have
they left all they knew behind, they have lost loved ones
to illnesses like scarlet fever and measles. The main item
of value they carry is their trade. Clare is reluctant to
leave the busy island, afraid to rejoin life when tragedies
are so shocking. She breaks the rules to help a Welshman
whose sole reminder of his wife is a flowered scarf. Clara
had a friend, a young man called Edward, who died in the
fire, and to get past her grief she decides to find out
more about him and visit his grave. Through Taryn's eyes,
we see the modern tragedy; she was to have met her husband
in one of the towers and was delayed by a customer asking
her to match an old silk scarf. Taryn survived, but was
widowed, and carries regrets.
My main complaint is that the attractive picture of flowers
on the first page of each chapter, made for tediously slow
progress through the computer reader. Other than that, I
read quickly, absorbing the many details and the disparate
lives of Taryn and Clara. I found the retelling of 9/11
distressing as I still don't look at anything about that
day. Readers might choose to skip a few pages. The two
women each inspire admiration as they seek reassurance of
love, while a broad portrait of the city past and present
is painted. As all such stories must, A FALL OF MARIGOLDS
has a bittersweet ending. Read Susan Meissner's book with a
box of tissues handy.
A beautiful scarf, passed down through the generations,
connects two women who learn that the weight of the world is
made bearable by the love we give away....
September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse
Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man
she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss
mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered
onto the scarf he carries…and finds herself caught in a
dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the
assumptions she’s made. Will what she learns devastate her
or free her?
September 2011. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, widow Taryn
Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully,
working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her
daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a
national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible
day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade
Towers…the same day a stranger reached out and saved
her.
Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open
Taryn’s eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?
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