What do you think?
Rate this book
The Ghosts of Melrose: A Novel
Buzz Malone's first book. The Ghosts of Melrose follows the life story of Aidan Keane. Born into a family outcast by the Irish Catholic community of Melrose, Iowa, and coming of age in the depression era, Aidan lives a life filled with tragedy and must overcome the loss of everthing that he holds dear. In the end he learns that time does not heal all wounds, but love, true love, is the only thing that can.
242 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2011
1 person is currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
Buzz Malone
6 books25 followersI am an author from Southern Iowa where I live on a small acreage writing books and blogs and being bruised and battered by my girlfriend's growing collection of unruly mules and horses.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 3, 2013
First a disclaimer. This book was difficult for me to read and review with the proper level of objectivity required. My personal history with the catholic church, and my Irish antecedents’ follies and alcohol-laced misadventures contributed to the difficulty. Growing up, I could have been Aidan Keane. I may still be.
Nonetheless, The Ghosts of Melrose kept me turning pages, like an Irish oral history. And like that history, filled with harshness and misery, yet tinged with a kind of reckless hope and perseverance, the book’s characters press on through all manner of challenges and tragedies till our peripatetic hero, Aidan Keane, travels full circle and finds what he has lost. As John Drew, an early character is depicted, so is Aidan Keane: “...he had nothing to lose but his life, and the fear of death was not in him.” These were tough, hard men, not given to sentiment.
The Keane family is central to this saga, a tale that’s clearly taken almost whole from those ‘rolling hills of Southern Iowa’ that Malone cherishes. While Ghosts claims to be a novel, it seems to be of that genre in name only. Indeed, the final chapter reads like an update, a where-are-they-now finale to the fictional characters Malone has created. These ghosts are real.
Since Irish immigrants, through their perfidy and grit, have wrested Melrose from its founders, the growing town needs a priest. Father McFadden arrives, and his role expands—cleric, confessor, town-savior, healer… child abuser. Collin Keane is sole witness to the priest’s late-night sodomy, and in good conscience must report it. Echoing recent modern church reaction, McFadden condemns Collin Keane, excommunicating him. In nineteenth century Iowa, where McFadden was county judge, jury and enforcer of punishment, this act banishes the Keane family to the status of Dump Devils. It is with that branding that young Aidan grows, a yellow-shirt outcast, pushed to the fringes of society.
Until Maizey comes into view. Maizey is the girl who will fill Aidan’s mind and heart throughout the book, as he travels the world, marries another, ships off to war, divorces and deals with the drug-addled death of his only son, an echo in its own right of the ghosts of his father and grandfather before him.
We find ourselves cheering for Aidan, this Irish knockaround fellow who drags himself, literally, out of the dump, dodges one tragedy after another, seems always to have an instinct for which road to avoid and therefore survive, and eventually find a way to confront the ghosts of Melrose. Without giving away the thoroughly satisfying ending, I’ll close with the book’s central theme: family history is full of the mess and mystery of humanity. And we all have our own ghosts.
Some technical points. In this book at least, Malone seems to have fallen in love with adjectives. He tends to string several together, a practice that dilutes the phrasing. Some word structures seem odd, such as ‘common place,’ ‘junk yard’ etc. which are one word, depending on the style guide used. Malone uses too many exclamation points!?!? in places, and there are a few typos here and there. The book has a kind of epistolary formatting, short paragraphs that resemble parts of letters, and that works very well to convey the mood.
All in all a highly readable historical novel of one man’s family, and the way that history shadows him through life, demanding its due, like a ghost he must finally learn to love.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life
Nonetheless, The Ghosts of Melrose kept me turning pages, like an Irish oral history. And like that history, filled with harshness and misery, yet tinged with a kind of reckless hope and perseverance, the book’s characters press on through all manner of challenges and tragedies till our peripatetic hero, Aidan Keane, travels full circle and finds what he has lost. As John Drew, an early character is depicted, so is Aidan Keane: “...he had nothing to lose but his life, and the fear of death was not in him.” These were tough, hard men, not given to sentiment.
The Keane family is central to this saga, a tale that’s clearly taken almost whole from those ‘rolling hills of Southern Iowa’ that Malone cherishes. While Ghosts claims to be a novel, it seems to be of that genre in name only. Indeed, the final chapter reads like an update, a where-are-they-now finale to the fictional characters Malone has created. These ghosts are real.
Since Irish immigrants, through their perfidy and grit, have wrested Melrose from its founders, the growing town needs a priest. Father McFadden arrives, and his role expands—cleric, confessor, town-savior, healer… child abuser. Collin Keane is sole witness to the priest’s late-night sodomy, and in good conscience must report it. Echoing recent modern church reaction, McFadden condemns Collin Keane, excommunicating him. In nineteenth century Iowa, where McFadden was county judge, jury and enforcer of punishment, this act banishes the Keane family to the status of Dump Devils. It is with that branding that young Aidan grows, a yellow-shirt outcast, pushed to the fringes of society.
Until Maizey comes into view. Maizey is the girl who will fill Aidan’s mind and heart throughout the book, as he travels the world, marries another, ships off to war, divorces and deals with the drug-addled death of his only son, an echo in its own right of the ghosts of his father and grandfather before him.
We find ourselves cheering for Aidan, this Irish knockaround fellow who drags himself, literally, out of the dump, dodges one tragedy after another, seems always to have an instinct for which road to avoid and therefore survive, and eventually find a way to confront the ghosts of Melrose. Without giving away the thoroughly satisfying ending, I’ll close with the book’s central theme: family history is full of the mess and mystery of humanity. And we all have our own ghosts.
Some technical points. In this book at least, Malone seems to have fallen in love with adjectives. He tends to string several together, a practice that dilutes the phrasing. Some word structures seem odd, such as ‘common place,’ ‘junk yard’ etc. which are one word, depending on the style guide used. Malone uses too many exclamation points!?!? in places, and there are a few typos here and there. The book has a kind of epistolary formatting, short paragraphs that resemble parts of letters, and that works very well to convey the mood.
All in all a highly readable historical novel of one man’s family, and the way that history shadows him through life, demanding its due, like a ghost he must finally learn to love.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life
June 21, 2011
I was so excited to receive “The Ghosts of Melrose” as a First Read and I was not disappointed. This gripping story centers around the Keane family and the tragic, multi-generational effects of a single, gross miscarriage of justice in the life of young Aiden Keane’s grandfather.
How different his life might have been but for this wrong. Instead, young Aiden and his brother are taught that life is not fair, people are not kind and being labeled as different is so painful it would be easier to simply give up. Buzz Malone tells his story with such sensitivity that I was alternately outraged, grieved and then so hopeful that somehow this injustice would be righted, but it never could be. Aiden’s triumph is in his refusal to ever give in, give up or stop believing he could find what he desperately needed – love and acceptance.
I’m really happy to recommend Malone’s first book. It is a story sensitively and well written and one of those books that, when I finished reading it, I felt I’d been reading about someone I knew. I hope to read more books from this talented author.
How different his life might have been but for this wrong. Instead, young Aiden and his brother are taught that life is not fair, people are not kind and being labeled as different is so painful it would be easier to simply give up. Buzz Malone tells his story with such sensitivity that I was alternately outraged, grieved and then so hopeful that somehow this injustice would be righted, but it never could be. Aiden’s triumph is in his refusal to ever give in, give up or stop believing he could find what he desperately needed – love and acceptance.
I’m really happy to recommend Malone’s first book. It is a story sensitively and well written and one of those books that, when I finished reading it, I felt I’d been reading about someone I knew. I hope to read more books from this talented author.
Want to read
June 10, 2011Sounds delightful!
August 29, 2016
This is the second of Buzz Malone's books I have read, and I am even more impressed with his all-round talent as a writer. I don't know how long he has been writing, but his prose, his command of plotting and structure and character, and his sheer ability to hold the reader are all fully developed.
The book itself follows the fortunes of the Keane family in a small town in Iowa from the nineteenth century until almost the present day, but is mostly concerned with the life of Aidan Keane, the last of the line. Victims of an astounding injustice at the hands of the local religious/political establishment, the Keanes have lived for years as pariahs and scavengers on the edge of society by the time Aidan is born. Though it is hoped that he will be the one able to raise himself above the family's circumstances, neither the townspeople nor events themselves allow him to succeed. His life is a succession of loss and suffering, and the author is particularly skillful in portraying the effect this has on Aidan's view of the world.
It is only very late in Aidan's life that anything occurs to redeem it, and the most touching aspect of the book is that this is the restoration of one of his earliest losses. Happy ending or not, though, this is one of the sadder books you're going to read. I don't think the author wants to suggest that everything can be "made right" in the end, but only that there are values like love and friendship that can make life worth living despite all else.
The book itself follows the fortunes of the Keane family in a small town in Iowa from the nineteenth century until almost the present day, but is mostly concerned with the life of Aidan Keane, the last of the line. Victims of an astounding injustice at the hands of the local religious/political establishment, the Keanes have lived for years as pariahs and scavengers on the edge of society by the time Aidan is born. Though it is hoped that he will be the one able to raise himself above the family's circumstances, neither the townspeople nor events themselves allow him to succeed. His life is a succession of loss and suffering, and the author is particularly skillful in portraying the effect this has on Aidan's view of the world.
It is only very late in Aidan's life that anything occurs to redeem it, and the most touching aspect of the book is that this is the restoration of one of his earliest losses. Happy ending or not, though, this is one of the sadder books you're going to read. I don't think the author wants to suggest that everything can be "made right" in the end, but only that there are values like love and friendship that can make life worth living despite all else.
October 10, 2011
I'm torn. This was such an engaging and ultimately uplifting story, but at the same time there were some truly jarring errors: the phrase "per say" rather than "per se" and the use of the word prospective when the correct word would have been respective. I know there are those out there who would call me nit-picky, but I can't help it. Nothing pulls me out of an engaging narrative faster than improper language usage (unless it's intentional/necessary for plot/character development). Had this story been professionally published (I believe CreateSpace is an outlet for self-publishing), these errors would have been quickly found and corrected. Hopefully, this story is strong enough that it will bring Mr. Malone to the attention of a proper publisher, and any future works will not suffer from this.
Negativity aside, I really, really liked the story. And since the obvious errors were few and far between, I'll forgive them because I did enjoy it so much. Aidan Keane is such a likeable tragic character. From what I gather, the story is based in fact, and I'm curious as to how much is true and how much is artistic license.
Negativity aside, I really, really liked the story. And since the obvious errors were few and far between, I'll forgive them because I did enjoy it so much. Aidan Keane is such a likeable tragic character. From what I gather, the story is based in fact, and I'm curious as to how much is true and how much is artistic license.
May 4, 2011
This is the Kindle version of The Ghosts Of Melrose. It is a pre-release version without the final cover art and has a couple more typos than the finished book. But the read is still just as good!
October 2, 2013
Tragic story but very well told and finally a book with an appropriate ending!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews