ShaSha, a prolific writer, has three novels in-progress. They are:
Tales From the Old Neighborhood
Simba! Simba! and
The Fairy Circle
Tales From the Old Neighborhood is about a girl growing up in the
Italian-Irish Catholic enclaves of Chicago in the 1950's and 60's.
Coming from a poor family herself, Marguerite (who was stuck with the
nickname Piggy Peggy in one of her many moments of bad luck) watches
with a child's sharp eye as her playmates' fathers--the made men of
Chicago--seem to be too nice to do the terrible things people say they
do. Marguerite's mother, Evie (named after the notorious Evelyn
Nesbitt) and her grandfather--the hard-drinking Micky Spencer (who is
the main character in one of ShaSha's plays)--are not necessarily any
better than the gangsters. Plus Monsignor Lendowski runs the
neighborhood church and school like his personal dominion where his
young priests are up to no good and a strange, young nun seems
hell-bent on challenging the Monsignor's authority. Marguerite sees it
all, hears it all, and lives it all.
If you would like to read the beginning of Tales From the Old Neighborhood, here it is:
Tales From the Old Neighborhood by Sharon Sassone
Book One: Piggy Peggy
Simba! Simba!
It is 1898 in Mombasa. The British Empire is building the Uganda Railway through undiscovered Africa (where millions of natives have already been living for centuries). A bridge is needed over the Tsavo River if the Empire’s building schedule is to be maintained.
Most inconveniently, a pair of man-eating lions has begun killing and eating the African and East Indian railway workers. If the lions were hungry in the beginning, they now are killing men at a much faster pace than they can eat them, and the natives decide these are no lions at all, but the gods taking revenge on workers helping the British violate Africa. The workers go on strike, the Africans for religious reasons and the Indians, as one worker put it, “because we did not come here to be food for lions!”
The British Home Office can do only one thing to deal with the dilemma. It sends one of its best and most experienced construction engineers—Colonel Nigel Sanderson, who has never set foot in Africa—to deal with the lion problem efficiently and immediately, and then get the bloody bridge built!
The situation is complicated by the Reverend ____________ _______________, who is there to convert the heathen natives to the true religion, and his young wife, Savannah, who has escaped an unsavory life in London only to be a prisoner of her autocratic husband. Their two lonely little girls must be guarded and protected from disease as well as wild animals, but life perks up when they meet two little African playmates whose mother, ________________, has been banished from their village because she has a disgusting fistula injury. Savannah persuades the company physician, Dr. _____________ ______________, who has a disturbing cough of his own, to help the injured mother, over the Reverend’s protests because he thinks white men’s surgical equipment should only be used on white people.
Colonel Sanderson, a crack gentleman hunter back in England, sets out to track down the man-eating lions in the brush and thorn bushes of Tsavo. Lions prove a little trickier to catch than foxes, and the whole situation becomes bizarre, tragic, and darkly hilarious in the heart of Africa.
If you would like to read the first chapter of this novel, here it is:
[coming soon!]
The Fairy Circle
Myrtle is a young bride on the prairies of Illinois in 1835. She is a well-educated woman from the Nantucket who married an uneducated but very handsome and exciting ambitious farmer named Miles Chesterfield. She moved with him out west, and, like so many other pioneer women, works day and night just to keep her growing family fed and clothed.
After a string of disastrous crops and then the death of one of their five children, Myrtle and Miles move to Nauvoo, a newly-founded town in Southern Illinois, where Miles is converted to a new religion—the Church of Later Day Saints—by one of their neighbors, Joseph Smith.
When another of their neighbors, Grandpa Lindquist and his lovely teenaged granddaughter Maudie, need help, especially when Grandpa looses his sight, Myrtle takes the young girl under her wing and becomes her surrogate mother—although she is only a few years older herself.
On his deathbed, Grandpa begs Miles to marry Maudie, and Myrtle is shocked to hear her husband agree. The wedding takes place, and Myrtle’s life is no longer endurable under such an unacceptable arrangement. Myrtle takes their four children and runs away to a small town in Central Illinois—New Salem—where she meets a brilliant, funny young man named Abe Lincoln, the town post master who spends his days and nights reading law books.
Abe and Myrtle become close friends, sharing their extraordinary intellect as well as Myrtle’s books, but Myrtle’s secret is tearing away at her. She has not told Abe that she is still married and not a widow as she led him to believe. When Abe declares his love for her, she must tell him the truth. He is devastated and leaves New Salem for the state’s capitol, Springfield.
Maudie shows up informing Myrtle that Joe has been killed in Nauvoo. Free to marry now, Myrtle follows Abe to Springfield, but it is too late. He has already met an appealing socialite named Mary Todd, whose father is a prominent Springfield businessman, and Abe has begun courting her. Abe introduces Myrtle to a wealthy man in town, Edward McCarron, and Myrtle finds herself with another marriage proposal and another lie—Abe has not told McCarron that Myrtle has four children back in New Salem!
This is a saga covering several generations that covers the growth of Chicago and a family’s following the Oregon Trail to the Northwest. If you would like to read the first chapter of this novel, here it is:
[coming soon!]
