Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Leaving Rock Harbor

This book isn’t my usual fare. I read it because it was a gift from my sister who gave it to me because it’s set in our old stomping grounds. One of the main characters is a Portuguese American. It’s a historical novel with the chapters titled by year, so over the course of the story we go from 1916 to 1934. It’s clear from all the geographical clues that Rock Harbor is Fall River, Massachusetts.



The historical aspect is well-researched and true. We see the boom and bust of the granite cotton textile mills, the ethnic tribalism (Pawtugees, Corkys, Canucks -Portuguese, Irish, French Canadians), the child labor, the struggling start of labor unions, the massive strikes (28,000 workers in 1928), the inequities of wealth, the side effects of Prohibition, the abandonment of the city by the mills to go south to cheaper labor.

(And, although the author does not tell us this, I know from my own research for my book about Portuguese Americans, the flight of the mills wasn’t just to cheaper labor, it was also to avoid labor protection laws that were being enacted by Northern states about work hours, child labor, workmen’s comp, safety regulations, etc. Long before the term Rustbelt was popularized, Fall River and neighboring New Bedford both saw their populations drop from 120,000 in 1920 to 90,000 in 2010.)

It’s a coming-of-age story of a girl whose family moves from New York state for her father’s job as an engraver of textile designs. Her mother doesn’t want her hanging out with the brown-skinned Portuguese kid who’s a high-school basketball star. But when the mother finds out that his best buddy is the son of the richest mill owner in town and a state senator, she lets her guard down.

Frankie (Frances, the young woman) goes on to have remarkably modern adventures for 1918 with the two young men – drinking and swimming with them in her underwear – and, at the start of the story, she’s only 15. They go to a secluded beach because the Portuguese kid is not allowed in the rich kid’s family country club.



So here’s our thesis: can a woman be in love with two men her entire life? She marries one of the men and has a child. The other man goes off to war and returns injured. I won’t say which one she marries, even in a spoiler. The story ends when she’s about 33 and she makes a shocking life-changing decision.

Although the book received a lot of critical recognition (Editors’ Choice by The New York Times, a June Indie Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association, and a finalist for the New England Book Award) it’s relatively low-rated on GR – 3.3. Few of my GR friends rated it highly. I too thought at times of putting it down. The characters weren’t pulling me in and I wondered - why?

I think it’s this: it reads like a historical story illustrated by the lives of the characters, rather than a novel focused on the lives of the characters informed by the historical background. I say this even though the bulk of the book is about the characters and there’s a lot of dialog.



I’ve been pondering this for a while and have yet to come up with any real ideas. There are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of books written about writing novels, but are they any about how to make your characters come alive and pull you into the story in that ‘can’t put it down’ way? What makes that happen?

Still a good read. I’m glad I read it and I particularly enjoyed the well-researched history and the local color of that era and area.



The author is a professor of creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She has written three novels including Capture the Flag. She’s also a playwright and screenwriter.

Top photo: a Portuguese American child laborer in a Fall River textile mill
One of the granite Fall River textile mills from fallriverreporter.com (mills in New Bedford were brick)
Map from 24timezones.com
The author from rebeccachace.com

[Revised 7/20/23]