What the Callen Women Know
An affectionate tribute to one plucky immigrant’s struggles, What the Callen Women Know is an inspiring biographical novel.
In Karen Anne McCullough’s historical novel What the Callen Women Know, a resilient Irish Catholic immigrant shapes a new life for herself in Canada.
Nula is the outspoken daughter of abusive tenant farmers in Cork County. She’s determined “to create a prosperous, fun-filled life.” Through a cruel local priest, she learns that her parents plan to send her away to become a nun. She flees with a friend, James, and their schoolteacher, Cara, who empathizes with their plight.
The settings are vivid, including impoverished Ireland at the turn of the century. Anti-Catholic sentiment and the looming presence of land agents are addressed, intensifying the threat of capture during Nula and her friends’ travels on foot toward Dublin. Still, with help, the hopeful group sails for Newfoundland.
After a typhoid outbreak results in Cara’s death, James and Nula wed to secure housing together. Their early hardships are covered in a brisk manner, if with clarity. Nula is realistic about her circumstances but is still sometimes despondent with regret over the marriage.
Indeed, Nula’s hardiness is focal. At times, though, her pursuit of self-improvement comes at the expense of more organic development and nuance. Her views are childish at first, and she files others into easy categories of good or bad, impeding deeper characterizations. And the narration is somewhat distant during the couple’s early days in Canada, such that Nula and James come to seem emblematic of immigrants who face similar challenges more than they are embodied individuals. A move to Ontario alleviates this vagueness, drawing out facets of Nula’s can-do personality: She befriends her Italian neighbors despite local prejudices and brightens her rented home with industrious fervor.
Throughout, folksy mantras appear at the heads of chapters to punctuate Nula’s tale, including “Don’t open closed doors,” “To thine own self be true,” and “You reap what you sow.” These loose organizing principles are also Nula’s words to live by; she sometimes repeats them to herself for motivation, dealing with the changes she faces with spiritedness. Her personal milestones, including homeownership, small business success, deaths, and her daughters’ weddings, are mined for momentum, though in the end it’s her friendships with other women that are her greatest constant. With them at her side, Nula marches toward prosperity with aplomb.
Inspired by McCullough’s grandmother’s story, the historical novel What the Callen Women Know covers a young immigrant’s growth into an accomplished matriarch with flourishing wisdom.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
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