These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly
Rating: 4/5 stars
My Thoughts:
This book turned out to be a really great historical fiction mystery and I’m super happy about it.
These Shallow Graves starts in the year 1890 New York with high society girl Jo Montfort learning that her father accidentally killed himself. Or did he? Jo knows her father and she knows he was smart enough to not clean a loaded gun, and she knows he wouldn’t kill himself either. As she investigates her father’s murder along with Eddie, a reporter from her father’s newspaper, she learns just how deep secrets of the past go. All while trying to keep up her life of high-class society and her family’s name.
I loved Jo. She was strong-willed and surprisingly smart. She’s naive and innocent at times to a fault but as someone from her time period, it was fitting. But I also loved the secondary characters, Oscar and especially Fay. A strong female friendship was a very welcome surprise.
“Fay!” she called. Too loudly. But she didn’t care.
Fay, who was a good twenty yards down the sidewalk now, turned around. She gave Jo a questioning look.
Jo started walking toward her, then broke into a run. “You’re the only friend I have, too,” she said, catching up to her. “The only real one.”
The two girls -one from Gramercy Square, the other from Mulberry Bend- hugged each other tightly, then went their separate ways.
While going through the class drama of getting engaged to a man one doesn’t love and wanting the freedom that men can have and that woman at this time could not, I truly felt the time period and while grim at times, I enjoyed reading about it.
Why is it, she wondered now, that boys get to do things and be things and girls only get to watch?
Then there was the romance that was pretty nice and also not the main focus of this book. It was sweet and the end was realistic. Eddie and Jo were great, mostly because of how well they worked together and figured stuff out together. I wouldn’t exactly call it a side plot but the romance wasn’t the major plot of the book.
The rabbit hole of the murder mystery was also fantastic. Each time after learning something new, it just put Jo back a few steps until finally everything clicked into place perfectly. I really liked it!
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