City of Orphans (review)

The Geless family, Danish immigrants in 1893 New York, needs every penny the parents and older children can make to keep their heads financially above water. Thirteen-year-old Maks Geless may feel Poverty breathing down his neck, but when he's shaken down for his newsboy pennies by the Plug Ugly gang, he understands what true destitution looks like. He invites Willa, the ferocious street girl who champions him, home for a meal, only to walk into a family crisis: his older sister Emma has been accused of stealing a gold watch from a room at the Waldorf Hotel, where she's a chambermaid. Now the family is short a vital income, Emma needs money for food in prison and for a lawyer, and the Plug Uglies are still threatening Maks. Inspired by the sensational detective stories that a boarder in the Geless household reads aloud each evening, Maks and Willa seek the services of crotchety, consumptive Bartleby Donck, a private investigator who pulls in a favor to get Maks a job at the Waldorf and then directs the children's sleuthing activities. Although the matter of the purloined watch is set up as a mystery, there's little tension or intrigue in the search for clues, and the villain's identity comes freighted with more pathos than surprise. Tenement life among the working poor is of more interest, and readers who expect a work of historical fiction are likely to be better satisfied than those who seek a crime thriller. A brief list of materials for further reading and viewing, including several titles written for children (though not identified as such), is appended.