Kim Fahner's ​The Donoghue Girl

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024)

​In the quiet lull between Xmas and New Year’s, I picked up The Donoghue Girl and couldn’t put it down. In this novel, Fahner succeeds in writing a compelling story with characters I care for and want to know about. In note at the back of the book, Fahner notes that the book is a “work of historical fiction based on the glimmer of a rumour within my grandmother’s family.”
 
The story begins in the summer of 1939 in Creighton, a small mining town in Northern Ontario. It centers around the Donoghues: the father, James, runs the local general store; the mother, his wife Bridget, oversees the family; Nellie is the oldest child, gone to the convent; and there are Ann, Lizzie, Jack and Maisie. As the story starts, a stranger comes to town to manage the local mine. The young women are intrigued by him. He has a dalliance with the oldest sister, Ann, but ends up wanting the second daughter, Lizzie, and gets her. The tension of his choosing Lizzie over Ann runs through the novel.
 
I loved Lizzie. She is a young woman who speaks the truth and gets into trouble for it. She imagines herself leaving the small town in search of something else, a life that is different from what women’s roles at the time were: marriage and children. Her marriage to Michael is stormy. His time at the mine is limited by his concern for safety. The company sends him to Finland to deal with the mine there. While he is gone, Lizzie is miserable and heartbroken. They have a passionate relationship. Before he left, they had sex and she became pregnant.
 
Fahner does such a great job of creating secrets and then having them revealed to cause conflict and excitement. Michael, like his father, drinks too much and is quick to lose his temper. He’s in Finland when the war begins, and there are rumours of spies in the mines. Things become volatile and he is sent back to Canada, but once there he is unable to take back the job he had. The company wants to give him a different job with lower pay. He isn’t interested in decides to prospect for gold up north in Blind River, away from his wife and child. Lizzie is pregnant again with their second child.
 
I suspect a lot of research went into ensuring the historical accuracy of this novel. I did check on a few things, and found they happened on the dates that were given in the novel, such as the Hindenburg explosion, the nickel mining in Petsamo in Finland, and the Winter War. I think Fahner does a great job of balancing truth and fiction in this novel. And equally important, if not more so for me in a novel, she has created characters with characteristics that I can recognize and relate to. I related to Lizzie so much. And I’ve experienced the feelings of passion she has for Michael. I’ve known men who were defined by their jobs and struggled to figure out their very beings when they lost them. I’ve known heavy drinkers with tempers.
 
There are numerous scenes that I’ve dogeared in the book because I have loved the language or the way in which Fahner succeeds in creating tension and revealing details about a character.
 
My only complaint about this book is that I didn’t want it to end. I want to see Lizzie alone and finding herself. 

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Amanda Earl (she/her) is a working writer, editor, publisher, reviewer, and visual poet who writes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is grateful for funding received from the City of Ottawa to work on her manuscript of winter sequences. Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry.  Please visit AmandaEarl.com for more information or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for musings on finding joy in difficult times.