Jeanine Cummins

Jeanine Cummins is the author of A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and Its Aftermath, published in 2004 and a surprise bestseller. The Outside Boy, published in 2010, was her first novel.

Her new novel is The Crooked Branch.

A few weeks ago I asked Cummins about what she was reading.  The author's reply:

I recently picked up Mary Beth Keane’s Fever, and it is a remarkable book – a thoughtful historical novel about the Irish American immigrant known as “Typhoid Mary.” Keane has done an astonishing job of recreating the detail and texture of New York City in the early nineteen hundreds, but even more impressive to me is how the author has managed to get inside the mind of Mary Mallon. In this telling, Mary Mallon is an entirely sympathetic figure, a woman who is intuitive and bright and undaunted by tremendous hardship. She is a woman who refuses despair. Keane has given Mary Mallon the great gift of humanity, and that character will haunt me long after I close this book.

Visit Jeanine Cummins's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Crooked Branch.

My Book, The Movie: The Crooked Branch.

--Marshal Zeringue