What do you think?
Rate this book
The Search for Maggie Ward
It is the summer after the Big War and, while most veterans are racing back to setup housekeeping, Jerry Keenan finds himself unattached, unable to settle down, and suffering nightmares form his wartime experiences. Enter Andrea King, an eighteen-year-old war widow. Finding her irresistible, Keenan embarks on a love affair so passionate that it re-awakens him to life and to God. Then, just when life looks rosiest, Andrea disappears. In searching for her, he uncovers her miserable past (and her real name, Maggie Ward) as an abused child and an abused wife. When he finally locates her, his quest focuses on winning the beautiful Maggie as his wife.
Audio Cassette
First published January 1, 1991
26 people are currently reading
138 people want to read
About the author
Andrew M. Greeley
377 books317 followersAndrew Greeley was a Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist, and author of 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of nonfiction. For decades, Greeley entertained readers with such popular characters as the mystery-solving priest Blackie Ryan and the fey, amateur sleuth Nuala Anne McGrail. His books typically center on Irish-American Roman Catholics living or working in Chicago.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/andrew...
http://us.macmillan.com/author/andrew...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 13, 2012
Don't let the less than exciting title fool you. This is an awesome story of love, forgiveness, and redemption. I reread this one every couple of years.
April 5, 2021
I have really enjoyed the other Andrew Greeley books I have read, but I struggled with this one and almost did not finish it. Jeremiah Keenan is back from the war as a decorated Commander, he is wandering the country kind of lost and then he sees a girl that is a ghost, a dream.....a ghost again and a vacillating dummy. There was also a lot about politics, sports and priestley wisdom that was boring.
September 17, 2020
Brilliant teaching book. Greeley is my new hero.
January 18, 2021
I couldn't even finish this book. Just awful.
February 17, 2022
200 pages too long
March 29, 2025
Not exactly sure.
February 21, 2014
So I read somewhere that the late Andrew Greeley either was or had studied for the catholic priesthood. I downloaded this thinking it would be something along the lines of a Father Dowling mystery. Oh, my gosh! Not so much, folks. Not at all.
We are transported instantly to the summer of 1946 from the first page of the book. World War II has been over nearly a year, and Americans have a confident uncertainty about their lives. The war claimed its share of lives, and it claimed another casualty, too—faith. At least, that’s how it is for former navy Commander Jerry Keenan. A member of a devoutly catholic and liberal democratic family, Jerry has determined he wants to see America before settling down to law school and the family business. It is in the act of this discovery that he encounters her! She is ghostly—almost translucent and beautifully and perfectly created. For the faithless Jerry, it is lust at first sight, and that first sight happens in a Tucson railroad station café. He turns on the Irish charm, and the full-breasted slender red-haired woman meets his dazzle with her own, and this book is off to a rollercoaster plot you won’t soon forget.
She is an irresistible force; he an immovable object—or so it seems at first. His heart, hardened by war, has lost its ability to feel spiritual things, and a new kind of atheism has replaced the old family faith. She’s a war widow. She lost a baby to what we now call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so she is much, much wiser than her 18 years.
He decides to include her in his multi-day tour of Arizona stopping as he does at ghost towns and old mines. By day two, they are heating up the already hot car with their in-car frisky behavior. By night two, they are sharing a bed. She is other worldly—almost angelic at times. It is as if she can read his mind and see deep into his soul.
At one point in their travels, they encounter a fearsome storm which literally flings them about. The storm triggers a host of remembrances and dreams for him of comrades killed and Japanese lives taken by virtue of his actions as a flyer. When he comes to at the end of the storm, she is gone.
This author’s description of the encounter between the two and their car trip is just shy of erotic in spots. My friends, these are most emphatically not squeaky clean Father Dowling mysteries. Greeley’s descriptions of the youthful Maggie Ward, who originally introduces herself to the navy flyboy as Andrea King, are hauntingly memorable for lots of reasons, not the least of which is their sometimes explicit nature.
Our navy pilot returns home to Chicago eventually, but the girl has so altered his life that he cannot stop obsessing over her. He begins a cross-country search for her that takes him from San Francisco to the button-down streets of Salt Lake City, to Denver, Philadelphia, and eventually home to Chicago. You just can’t help but root for this guy and hope he finds her. So vivid is the writing here that you want to search for her yourself.
There are some fascinating dialogues here about God and the nature of God from the girl’s perspective and from his. Ironically enough, it is he, the war-weary atheist who forcefully teaches her that grace is real and that, no matter what her past is, she is not automatically damned.
Greeley masterfully captures 1946 America here. He talks about that element of society that feared a return to the pre-war Great Depression while feeling the confidence to demand more consumer goods and new ways to spend that money they saved during the war. You’ll learn about the songs of 1946 and that year’s movies.
If profanity, and sometimes explicit sexual descriptions are a problem for you, you may want to pass this one by. But Greeley deals with interesting topics here regarding God and His persona, if you will, that could make this one an interesting read.
I admit I was captured by his writing style and the vivid nature of his descriptions of the effervescent Andrea King/Maggie Ward. Her beauty, giving nature, strong spirit, wisdom, and snappy wit could doubtless make a young ex-flyboy soar higher than ever he did in the best of his planes during the war. But she’s also just a half a breath away from the scary side of crazed and unstable, too. There are her inexplicable fears when they visit certain places in the desolate Arizona desert. Why does she lie to him and tell him early on that her name is Andrea? How is she able to so often and so fully read his mind? There’s a bit of the supernatural here—just enough to make this deliciously fascinating.
A word about the narration: I had an unabridged cassette copy of this my public library has and read it that way. The commercial version uses several narrators to do the various voices of the characters. The female voice of Maggie Ward is absolutely melodic and sounds very much 18, and that may have had some impact on my belief that this will be a book I won’t quickly dismiss or forget. I don’t know whether a single voice narration would have quite the same impact.
We are transported instantly to the summer of 1946 from the first page of the book. World War II has been over nearly a year, and Americans have a confident uncertainty about their lives. The war claimed its share of lives, and it claimed another casualty, too—faith. At least, that’s how it is for former navy Commander Jerry Keenan. A member of a devoutly catholic and liberal democratic family, Jerry has determined he wants to see America before settling down to law school and the family business. It is in the act of this discovery that he encounters her! She is ghostly—almost translucent and beautifully and perfectly created. For the faithless Jerry, it is lust at first sight, and that first sight happens in a Tucson railroad station café. He turns on the Irish charm, and the full-breasted slender red-haired woman meets his dazzle with her own, and this book is off to a rollercoaster plot you won’t soon forget.
She is an irresistible force; he an immovable object—or so it seems at first. His heart, hardened by war, has lost its ability to feel spiritual things, and a new kind of atheism has replaced the old family faith. She’s a war widow. She lost a baby to what we now call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so she is much, much wiser than her 18 years.
He decides to include her in his multi-day tour of Arizona stopping as he does at ghost towns and old mines. By day two, they are heating up the already hot car with their in-car frisky behavior. By night two, they are sharing a bed. She is other worldly—almost angelic at times. It is as if she can read his mind and see deep into his soul.
At one point in their travels, they encounter a fearsome storm which literally flings them about. The storm triggers a host of remembrances and dreams for him of comrades killed and Japanese lives taken by virtue of his actions as a flyer. When he comes to at the end of the storm, she is gone.
This author’s description of the encounter between the two and their car trip is just shy of erotic in spots. My friends, these are most emphatically not squeaky clean Father Dowling mysteries. Greeley’s descriptions of the youthful Maggie Ward, who originally introduces herself to the navy flyboy as Andrea King, are hauntingly memorable for lots of reasons, not the least of which is their sometimes explicit nature.
Our navy pilot returns home to Chicago eventually, but the girl has so altered his life that he cannot stop obsessing over her. He begins a cross-country search for her that takes him from San Francisco to the button-down streets of Salt Lake City, to Denver, Philadelphia, and eventually home to Chicago. You just can’t help but root for this guy and hope he finds her. So vivid is the writing here that you want to search for her yourself.
There are some fascinating dialogues here about God and the nature of God from the girl’s perspective and from his. Ironically enough, it is he, the war-weary atheist who forcefully teaches her that grace is real and that, no matter what her past is, she is not automatically damned.
Greeley masterfully captures 1946 America here. He talks about that element of society that feared a return to the pre-war Great Depression while feeling the confidence to demand more consumer goods and new ways to spend that money they saved during the war. You’ll learn about the songs of 1946 and that year’s movies.
If profanity, and sometimes explicit sexual descriptions are a problem for you, you may want to pass this one by. But Greeley deals with interesting topics here regarding God and His persona, if you will, that could make this one an interesting read.
I admit I was captured by his writing style and the vivid nature of his descriptions of the effervescent Andrea King/Maggie Ward. Her beauty, giving nature, strong spirit, wisdom, and snappy wit could doubtless make a young ex-flyboy soar higher than ever he did in the best of his planes during the war. But she’s also just a half a breath away from the scary side of crazed and unstable, too. There are her inexplicable fears when they visit certain places in the desolate Arizona desert. Why does she lie to him and tell him early on that her name is Andrea? How is she able to so often and so fully read his mind? There’s a bit of the supernatural here—just enough to make this deliciously fascinating.
A word about the narration: I had an unabridged cassette copy of this my public library has and read it that way. The commercial version uses several narrators to do the various voices of the characters. The female voice of Maggie Ward is absolutely melodic and sounds very much 18, and that may have had some impact on my belief that this will be a book I won’t quickly dismiss or forget. I don’t know whether a single voice narration would have quite the same impact.
January 21, 2015
I am a fan of Andrew Greeley…however this book did not have his usual edginess. I think he was trying to write about a Navy man’s PTSD and a young woman’s self esteem issues…and missed the target.
Ex Navy fighter pilot Jerry Keenan is driving to clear his head of the nightmares of war. He is a decorated commander, but feels the pain of the loss of those he killed and of his fallen comrades.
He runs into Andrea King and young, shy waif and takes her driving to where she wants to be. Along the way they fall into bed and in love.
Then, in a storm, she is gone.
He spend the next few months (without the help of the internet – this is in the 1940s) trying to locate her. She changed her name to run from her past. His quest for “Maggie Ward” takes him around the US…and to his back door.
This is not Andrew Greeley’s best work. I found many parts of it far fetched and unbelievable.
Ex Navy fighter pilot Jerry Keenan is driving to clear his head of the nightmares of war. He is a decorated commander, but feels the pain of the loss of those he killed and of his fallen comrades.
He runs into Andrea King and young, shy waif and takes her driving to where she wants to be. Along the way they fall into bed and in love.
Then, in a storm, she is gone.
He spend the next few months (without the help of the internet – this is in the 1940s) trying to locate her. She changed her name to run from her past. His quest for “Maggie Ward” takes him around the US…and to his back door.
This is not Andrew Greeley’s best work. I found many parts of it far fetched and unbelievable.
August 21, 2020
One of my favorite Greeley books to read for many reasons. I've lived in/near many of the places he talks about and visited most that still exist. The story just clicks with me and I love the characters. I can just feel what the 'hero' in the story feels. I also love history.
That being said, I am not a fan of the audio book. While the narrator's voice has been good for other books I've listened to, it just didn't work here. Some of the audio tricks were annoying and some of the character readings, by others, were read like they had no idea what was going on.
I'm hoping other Greeley books work better.
That being said, I am not a fan of the audio book. While the narrator's voice has been good for other books I've listened to, it just didn't work here. Some of the audio tricks were annoying and some of the character readings, by others, were read like they had no idea what was going on.
I'm hoping other Greeley books work better.
January 17, 2008
I really loved this book but it ends rather abruptly
and not in the same style,
Nobody crafts Characters like Greeley
and not in the same style,
Nobody crafts Characters like Greeley
Read
August 28, 2008F Gre
February 20, 2010
A love story that's bizzare (ghostly) and was found to be enjoyable. May not like the ending, however this fiction work by Andrew ranks high in my book.
July 4, 2011
Great book. Classic\e Greeley.
April 10, 2013
Hauntingly beautiful and captivating.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews