Reviewed by Fran Hawthorne
Posted on: May 5, 2026
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Many people, as they stroll through cemeteries, notice the names and dates on the headstones of strangers. They might comment about how old—or, sadly, how young—someone was at death. They might muse that a man who died in his twenties between 1942 and 1945 or in the late 1960s perhaps died fighting in World War II or the Vietnam War. If you linger long enough, every gravestone tells a story.
This lovely debut novel takes some of the headstones at Brooklyn’s landmark Green-Wood Cemetery as the launchpad for an intertwined series of portraits that trace the history of New York City from 1860 to 2020.
Each of the ten chapters could stand alone as an individual short story. But they are strengthened by the hints and parallels scattered among them—shotgun marriages, scenes at Macy’s department store, and especially Green-Wood itself.
A few of the main characters were real people, including the popular Civil War-era actress, Maggie Mitchell (who was a Confederate sympathizer and mistress of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth), and Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet, the first Black woman principal of a New York City school. Some of the other chapters bring in real events in the city’s history, such as the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and a less well-known airplane crash 41 years earlier. Most of the characters and all the plot details, however, are fictional.
History sometimes plays a key role in these stories and sometimes stays in the background. For instance, the Covid pandemic thoroughly upends the lives of the four central characters (as it did to all Americans) in “Shore Road.” The deceptively quiet “Her Big Day,” by contrast, seems to involve no great world event. The story could take place in almost any year between the end of World War II and the flowering of the women’s movement. (In fact, it’s set in 1961.)
The trail of racism is especially important throughout the book, from Mitchell’s pro-Confederate sympathies and the New York draft riots of 1863 that destroyed a Black orphanage to the long-overdue restoration of the 19th century “colored lots” at Green-Wood.
With settings in ten different years, author Jeanine Boulay has done an impressive amount of research. She vividly describes the changing street life, social mores, and clothing fashions of each era. Just as impressive is her creativity in imagining ten different, richly drawn casts of characters.
The final story, “The Lots,” is the only weak spot, drawing all the strings together a bit too clumsily. Still, the path to that point is fascinating, beautiful, and winding, just like the paths of Green-Wood itself. (Believe me: I live near that cemetery, and I’ve managed to get pleasantly lost almost every time I go off my standard route.)
