A Harsh and Private Beauty

by Kate Kelly

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.

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2019

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Kelly, Kate, 1950- (from Library of Congress)

As a professional writer, Kate Kelly specializes in helpful nonfiction and has more than 24 titles to her credit. Topics range from business subjects to raising teenagers; she also writes on health and wellness. Kelly works as both a collaborator with experts and as author of her own books.

Kate Kelly is well known to the media as a reliable expert on parenting and on family safety. She is frequently quoted in magazines and newspapers and appears regularly on television.

Some of her titles are The Teen Health Book (Norton), which she worked on with adolescent medicine specialist Ralph I. Lopez, M.D., and Living Safe in an Unsafe World (NAL), for which she has done a great deal of media recently because of the heightened public interest in safety. In addition, there is continuing media interest in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Parenting a Teenager.

Reviews

[Jennifer Clements · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved all the history covered in this book, including organized crime in Chicago, the development of Jazz and Blues music in North America, and prohibition. I thought the structure worked well, as it jumped back and forth between time periods.

[Ursula Pflug · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this wonderful family saga for ORB, the Ottawa Review of Books:

"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?"

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[Heather Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautifully written and poetic novel is a treat for music and history buffs alike! I fell in love with both Ruby Grace, the novel's feisty 89 year old heroine, and Kate Kelly's gorgeous prose:

"The blues is sultry and sad and painful, but it keeps moving, finding beauty in the harsh struggle of life. It is the sound of the soul that cannot be defeated, the voice of the voiceless." - page 16, A Harsh and Private Beauty, Kate Kelly.

Highly recommended.