The Family Overhead

When Con and Margaret Mary Skilly, an elderly couple who have always longed for children, begin finding abandoned children left and right, they never question their good luck but simply raise the three foundlings with love and devotion.

Too soon the three kids are left on their own again. It's the Depression, with more feet than shoes, more appetites than dinners, when rumrunners wear diamonds big as knuckles, even the cops have favorite speakeasies, and the thrills of radio and the talkies hold the nation spellbound.

Only Birdy's Regina wants the kids. A diffident, self-effacing young woman, she has always been cowed by her mother, bullied by her absurd husband, and intimidated by her own infant. But she turns out to have the heart of a lioness, and is determined to keep the foundlings free of the State's clutches. Along the way she finds a strong and completely unexpected ally.

Joseph William Meagher brings to teeming life this Brooklyn neighborhood and the people in it who struggle for food and rent, love and fun, and everything that keeps life going. If characters caring deeply for one another are unfashionable, then this is an unfashionable novel.

But such an enjoyable one!