Meet Jack Bodkin author of Briarhill to Brooklyn: An Irish Family’s Journey to Freedom and Opportunity, on Saturday, July 20th at 11am!
This event will be a meet and greet signing at Bethany Beach Books!
About Jack:
Jack Bodkin is the author of Briarhill to Brooklyn: An Irish Family’s Journey to Freedom and Opportunity. It is his debut novel, which he self-published in 2021. Jack is a proud Irish American, and his concern that the story of his Irish family’s bravery and perseverance during the Great Famine and the years that followed would be lost to future generations inspired his work of historical fiction. He dedicated Briarhill to Brooklyn to his granddaughter Sally.
Briarhill to Brooklyn, a 2022 BookLife Editor’s Pick, has not only catapulted Jack into the online book-selling spotlight but also into the hearts of readers. This novel, which soared to 6th place on Amazon’s rankings in Historical British and Irish Literature, has garnered widespread acclaim and generated self-published sales of 24,000 copies. Briarhill to Brooklyn’s success story was further honored as it was an Indie Author Project 2023 Regional Winner and named the West Virginia Indie Author Book of the Year. These accolades are a testament to the compelling narrative and emotional depth of Briarhill to Brooklyn, a story that has resonated with readers worldwide.
Jack is a retired CPA. He was born in Brooklyn and raised in Merrick, New York. After graduating from Chaminade High School and Wheeling College, he began his professional career in New York City before returning to Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1977, where he still resides with his wife, Christine.
Briarhill to Brooklyn: An Irish Family’s Journey to Freedom and Opportunity
Briarhill to Brooklyn is a work of creative nonfiction in which Jack Bodkin tells the story of his Irish Catholic family’s journey from Briarhill, County Galway, Ireland on a coffin ship named Cushlamachree. The family—John and Eleanor Bodkin and seven of their children— began their journey on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1848. Their destination was Brooklyn.
The main characters in the book are real people, and the locations, events, and timelines are generally historically accurate. Some of the book is fact, but much of the story is fiction. The tale Bodkin tells in Briarhill to Brooklyn relates what he has imagined about his Irish ancestors’ lives between 1848 and 1902. It is fiction sewn together with places, names, and dates found in his research.
The prologue sets the stage for the immigrants’ story, using the retrospective voice of a first-person narrator. The narrator—one of the young siblings—describes the family crowding around the supper table in their Briarhill cottage. The young storyteller recalls his mother speaking in Irish to his father: “John, for the future of our children, we must go to America.”
British parliament’s role in the starvation of the Irish people is clear from the opening pages of Briarhill to Brooklyn, and the reader will understand the tragic conditions in famine-era Galway City as the narrator relates the startling images he encounters walking along the main streets of the ancient city.
The early chapters establish the novel’s several storylines, and the first half of the book is consumed by the family’s final few days in Ireland, their steerage voyage across the Atlantic, and the Cushlamachree’s landing in lower Manhattan.
An unimaginable hurdle confronts the siblings only weeks after their arrival in America, but the siblings survive and manage to assimilate into New York’s burgeoning and contentious melting pot.
Clearly, the most significant event that transpired in the United States after the Bodkins arrived in New York was the Civil War, and several chapters of Briarhill to Brooklyn detail the impact the war had on the siblings. Two of the Bodkin brothers enlisted in the Union Army as the war raged, and while one brother bides two years of his time guarding the peaceful and bucolic City of New Orleans, the older of the two brothers becomes a fledgling surgeon on Alabama’s battlefields where he learns the skills of a profession that would support the family into the twentieth century.
The tale Bodkin tells in Briarhill to Brooklyn is not quite a “rags to riches” story, but it is the tale of an immigrant family’s success.