{"id":6287,"date":"2025-03-01T06:34:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-01T14:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6287"},"modified":"2025-03-01T06:34:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T14:34:24","slug":"radha-vatsal-no-10-doyers-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/radha-vatsal-no-10-doyers-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Radha Vatsal: No. 10 Doyers Street"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Archana \u201cArchie\u201d Morley is a journalist working in 1907 New York City.\u00a0 She\u2019s a double outsider: she\u2019s a woman, and she\u2019s from India.\u00a0 Her physician husband, who has defied his family to marry her, is quite tolerant of her choice to don pants and traverse dangerous parts of the city looking for stories.\u00a0 And boy, does she find some.\u00a0 While her editor has her latched on to the notorious murder of Stanford White<\/a> by Harry Thaw, Archie gets distracted by a gang style shooting in Chinatown and the gangster who may or may not be behind it, Mock Duck.<\/a><\/p>\n

Mock Duck, Harry Thaw and Stanford White were all real people in turn of the century New York, but Mock Duck is the person Archie \u2013 and the novel \u2013 focus on.\u00a0 While the book definitely opens with a crime it\u2019s less of a mystery than it is a straight up historical novel.\u00a0 Vatsal is deeply skilled at portraying the sounds, smells and people of New York, and the people of Chinatown, who are as outsider as it gets.<\/p>\n

Chinese weren\u2019t allowed to vote or become citizens though they were allowed to work, and work they did, creating their own community \u2013 a community the mayor of New York wants to rip down to create a park.\u00a0 So unimportant are the Chinese to New York \u201csociety\u201d there\u2019s no thought given to where the population of Chinatown might relocate were their entire community to be torn down.\u00a0 That\u2019s the \u201cmeta\u201d view.<\/p>\n

The \u201cmicro\u201d view is what draws you in as a reader, however.\u00a0 When Archie goes to report on Mock Duck at his home at No. 10 Doyers Street she finds a crowd inside his apartment.\u00a0 The city, in the form of what would now be called Child Protective Services, are there to take his daughter away.\u00a0 She\u2019s an adorable six year old and the separation from her family is both abrupt and heartbreaking.\u00a0 Archie is witness to the bereft parents when their child is taken away from them, and later in court, to the ridiculous reason she was removed from the household.<\/p>\n

The case of the daughter is only the starting point for Vatsal\u2019s look at Chinatown as well as her examination of Archie\u2019s unusual and happy marriage, which at times takes her into the upper echelons of society.\u00a0 It\u2019s through these connections that Archie is able to interview the mayor and boost her career.\u00a0 Perceiving this, Mock Duck begins to appreciate Archie\u2019s intelligence and see her as a tool he might be able to use.\u00a0 He does grant her some access, an access denied to other reporters.<\/p>\n

While Archie is often \u201coff the reservation,\u201d as far as her boss is concerned, she does turn in some great stories, but she also ignores specific assignments, making the tension at her job (filled with male reporters who look down on her) more intense.\u00a0 This book begins with heartbreak and ends up being an extremely deft portrait of the way politics work. Both the heartbreak of Mock\u2019s family and the political levers and the way they are used are pretty timeless.\u00a0 Vatsal\u2019s portrayal of a city at a specific time, as it was growing and changing almost daily, is an adroit one.\u00a0 This is a book that makes an impression though I was hoping for a bit more \u00a0resolution to the story she\u2019s telling.\u00a0 While it may be realistic, it was on some levels unsatisfying.\u00a0 However the character of Archie and the story of a bursting New York City is indelible.\u00a0 —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archana \u201cArchie\u201d Morley is a journalist working in 1907 New York City.\u00a0 She\u2019s a double outsider: she\u2019s a woman, and she\u2019s from India.\u00a0 Her physician husband, who has defied his family to marry her, is quite tolerant of her choice to don pants and traverse dangerous parts of the city looking for stories.\u00a0 And boy, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2020,2021,10,1472,2019,2018,1276],"class_list":["post-6287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1907-chinatown-nyc","tag-female-journalist","tag-historical","tag-level-best-books","tag-no-10-doyers-street","tag-radha-vatsal","tag-robin-agnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6289,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287\/revisions\/6289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}