A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby’s grandparent’s immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny’s life in 1920s Chicago—the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition—and Ruby’s subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto. Headstrong and talented, Ruby struggled with the conventions of the times, was trapped in a marriage that forced her to give up her singing career, and in love with another man who shares her passion for music. Now, on the train headed back to a city she cannot remember, to a daughter she hardly knows, Ruby tries to look honestly at herself and the choices she has made, choices that affected not only her children, but her grandchildren. Ruby has a stroke on route, leaving the disconnected story of her life and love in the hands of her granddaughter, Lisa, who must reveal a secret to her father, Ruby’s son, that her grandmother guarded all her life.
“Kate Kelly’s debut novel weaves the power of great storytelling with the elusiveness of memory and the revelation of secrets. Once a singer in bluesy jazz clubs, Ruby Grace, headstrong and independent, is now a grandmother to granddaughter Lisa. Her memories take her back to childhood, to her father Danny Grace and the larceny and dark dealings of 1920s Chicago, and eventually to the secret love of her life. She also fights her aging frailty with a stubbornness of spirit reminiscent of Hagar in The Stone Angel. Her courage, both as a young and old woman, is just what Lisa needs to find her own path in a rapidly changing world. Much of the narrative unfolds on a train journey, and this is a trip you won’t want to miss.”
—Jan Rehner, author of Missing Matisse and Almost True
“Kate Kelly’s A Harsh and Private Beauty transports us to a pulsing, teeming Chicago in the early twentieth century, as a family of Irish immigrants makes its way into the new world. Through her astute and nuanced observations of emotion and relationship, Kelly unravels the complicated threads that entwine a family and its collective and individual memories. As the voices of jazz greats haunt the text, the bold and compelling Ruby Grace and her family come to acknowledge the capricious nature of memory, and that even amid life’s most extreme trials and hardships, beauty is ever-present.”
—Linda Quennec, author of Fishing for Birds
“This great family saga takes us from Chicago to Montreal and Toronto, from gangster wars in the Prohibition Era to the war of the sexes in the next generation. Family secrets are revealed, conventions (and hearts) are broken, and careers are forged in this fascinating tale told by the matriarch of the family, indomitable Ruby Grace. The story resonates with her granddaughter Lisa, who is at a cross-road in her own life, and it will resonate with readers everywhere. Bonus points if you love jazz and blues!”
—Erika Rummel, author of The Effects of Isolation on the Brain and The Painting on Auerberg’s Wall
Inanna Admin –
A Harsh and Private Beauty by Kate Kelly
reviewed by Susan Ouriou, award-winning fiction writer and literary translator; author of Damselfish and Nathan and translator of Blue Bear Woman and The Body of the Beasts for The Minerva Reader – December 15, 2019
https://www.theminervareader.com/library-2019
In spoken-word artist Kate Kelly’s first novel, A Harsh and Private Beauty, Ruby Grace invites readers into her life even as she cautions them that “the storyteller tries to make life acceptable, but . . . in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” So the story of 1920s Chicago—gangsters, nightclubs and Prohibition—and present-day Toronto and Montreal unfolds with the lies that are woven into Ruby’s private life as a mother, wife and lover and her public life as a renowned jazz and blues singer. In the end, however, those lies have much to reveal about the truth.
Inanna Admin –
A Harsh and Private Beauty by Kate Kelly
reviewed by Ursula Pflug
The Ottawa Review of Books – September 5, 2020
https://www.ottawareviewofbooks.com/single-post/2020/09/05/A-Harsh-and-Private-Beauty-by-Kate-Kelly
Educator and spoken word artist Kate Kelly’s debut novel A Harsh and Private Beauty follows a family of Irish immigrants to prohibition-era Chicago. Progeny of a family uprooted from the culture and tradition of their native Ireland, brothers Michael and Daniel Kenny take to the mean streets to forge a living. Well, Michael anyway. He urges his little brother, always the bright one, to stay in school while he and his friends struggle to navigate the emerging gang culture. Becoming a rum-running gang’s accountant isn’t quite what we’d imagined for sensitive Danny, but life sometimes foils our expectations and that’s an underlying theme of Kelly’s—do we become embittered or adapt to reduced or changed circumstances?
The Kenny brothers’ story is intercut with that of Danny’s granddaughter, Ruby Grace, a jazz and opera singer in almost modern-day Montreal and Toronto. While she is ambitious and doesn’t yearn for the conventional role of wife and mother, she doesn’t quite believe her singing teacher, the legendary Alfred La Liberté, when he tells her she is a good enough soprano to perform on the stages of Europe. Classes are expensive, and the scholarship he is sure she will be granted if she applies to McGill seems out of reach to her middle-class parents, and so Ruby Grace settles. She has no great love for her first husband, John Grace, who she describes simply as “a good man.” Later she meets Leland James who is the antithesis of settling; with him, she finds untrammelled mutual desire, a mutual love for music, and a true meeting of souls. She loves her children but often feels she would have been better off a few decades later when she could have had a life focused solely on Leland and on her burgeoning singing career as a jazz and blues artist, which have turned out to be more accessible than opera. She shares all of this with hergranddaughter Lisa on a train to Chicago when she is in reality too fragile already to make the trip. She succumbs to a stroke while underway but not before she has shared a secret with Lisa she’s never told anyone.
Ruby Grace tells Lisa throughout that she has no regrets. Each choice we make contributes to who we are in the present moment and we must accept that even our poor ones gave birth to our present selves and we would not exist without them. Ruby reminds us of this often and we admire her guts and strength even though we understand it might have been difficult to be one of her less-loved husbands or her child. Kudos to Kelly for creating a believable and unforgettable heroine who isn’t always likeable, but remains sympathetic even when she’s not. Complexity is the underpinning of life and Kelly doesn’t shy away from acknowledging this truth. The novel’s title is from a quote taken from E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and this tells us much of the perspective Kelly wished to impart.
Daniel Kenny is in some ways the most sympathetic character, a man who has survived the battlefields of WWI and gang warfare in Chicago, eventually relocating his family including Ruby to Montreal where he works hard to protect them from all he has seen. He feels great love for those under his protection and yet throughout the book we wonder if he too did not deserve the true meeting of souls that his granddaughter, the firebrand Ruby so avidly slurps up.
This fascinating novel includes much in the way of insight into Capone’s Chicago and the ways in which young men may become involved in gangs when there is little else on the table. A fine book, hopping back and forth through time, showing us how even loving tightly knit families both coddle and thwart us, sometimes both at once.