The Cold Millions

Starred review from June 29, 2020
Walter (Beautiful Ruins) reconstructs the free speech riots of 1909–1910 in Spokane, Wash., in this superb tale of orphaned, train-hopping brothers Gig and Rye Dolan. After their mother dies from tuberculosis, Rye, 16, leaves their childhood home in Montana to join Gig. The brothers spend a year looking for seasonal work, then settle in Spokane, the “old Klondike town had grown into a proper city,” where “money flowed straight uphill” and a $10 pair of gloves is a class-defining luxury. Rye is arrested during a riot and charged with disorderly conduct, and his lawyer introduces him to the sympathetic Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a New Yorker and union organizer who has come to Spokane to advocate for “the cold millions with no chance in this world.” Gig and Rye also meet Ursula the Great, a bawdy vaudevillian who cavorts in corset and stockings with a caged cougar and wins Gig’s heart despite her romantic involvement with a mining boss. The novel’s cast mixes fictional characters and historical figures such as labor lawyer Fred Moore, police chief John Sullivan, and organizers John Walsh and Frank Little, and adds a literary layer to Gig’s self-determination (he travels with a library including White Fang and two volumes of War and Peace, “always on the lookout for the rest”). The sum is a splendid postmodern rendition of the social realist novels of the 1930s by Henry Roth, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, updated with strong female characters and executed with pristine prose. This could well be Walter’s best work yet.

May 1, 2020

In early 1900s America, the Dolan brothers hop freight trains and grab shady day jobs, with 16-year-old Rye wanting a more stable life and flamboyant older brother Gig working for union rights. Through vaudeville singer Ursula the Great, they meet a dangerous mining magnate even as Rye is drawn to 19-year-old activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. From the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Beautiful Ruins.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2020

Gr 9 Up-When his mother dies, Ryan, 16, joins his 23-year-old brother, Gig, for a life on the road. They travel from Montana and reach Spokane, WA in time for the free speech riots of 1909. Teen readers will see that current demonstrations and complaints about police brutality have a long history. Handsome, charming Gig suffers in jail after speaking out while Rye is helped by 19-year-old Ellen Gurley Flynn, union organizer and agitator for the poor, the cold millions. Curious readers will want to learn more about this real-life character. Rye joins her to visit nearby towns to try to raise money for the cause while Gig sits in jail. They almost lose their lives in a mining camp because of a terrible betrayal and return without the money Flynn was able to raise. The poverty and violence of the early 20th century may be upsetting to some readers, but Walter brings the struggles of the time to vivid life. Most characters are white. VERDICT A page-turner by a talented author who depicts fascinating characters both real and imagined.-Karlan Sick, formerly at NYPL

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2020
Irresistible hobo brothers, an evil tycoon, a pregnant union organizer, a burlesque star, and a shady private eye light up a tale of the great Northwest in the early 20th century. The fact that the same author has written books as wildly different and all as transporting as The Zero (2006), The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009), Beautiful Ruins (2012), and now this latest tour de force is testimony to Walter's protean storytelling power and astounding ability to set a scene, any scene. Here it's Spokane, his hometown, circa 1909. Orphaned Montana brothers Gig and Rye Dolan, 23 and 16, have wound up there along with so many others--"they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys...and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans." The violent adventure that befalls Rye and Gig the next morning becomes the centerpiece of a story that Rye ends up reciting onstage when he goes on the road with 19-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a suffragette and union organizer and one of several real-life characters in the book. The free speech riots the Dolan brothers get involved in and end up incarcerated for are taken from history as well. At intervals, chapters are narrated by first-person characters both major and minor, several of whom die on the page midsentence, a literally breathtaking fictional flourish. Two favorite voices are Ursula the Great, the vaudeville performer Gig falls in love with, and Del Dalveaux, a detective in the employ of Ursula's patron. Noted for her singing and her way with a live cougar, Ursula displays food-writing talent as well: "We were served a French red wine, a fine local beefsteak, scallops from Seattle, and gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel." Dalveaux is a hard-boiled piece of work: "Spokane gave me the morbs. Right blood blister of a town. Six-month millionaires and skunk hobos, and none in between....The city was twice the size of the last time I'd hated being there." We have heard that Jess Walter writes nonstop: Seven days a week, 365 days a year. Please, never stop.

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Starred review from October 1, 2020
In Spokane in 1909, love more than idealism moves 16-year-old Rye Dolan to follow his older brother, Gig, against Gig's wishes, to a free speech protest and, as a result, to jail. When it's discovered that he's being kept in the brutal, overfilled prison as a minor, he's released and becomes a rather unwitting spokesperson for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the labor union behind the rally for which Gig is a vocal organizer. With Gig still in jail, Rye is taken under the wings of both a local mining millionaire and Gurley, which is how real-life IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is mostly referred to in these pages. The precarious-from-the-start setup introduces Rye to more suffering and more possibilities than he'd known existed in his difficult young life and forces him to forge a path outside of his beloved brother's shadow. Strung up around true events and a handful of real people, Walter's (We Live in Water, 2013) latest is informed by intensive, ardent research and reverence for his home city; consider this book a train ticket to a past time and place. In addition to boldly voiced characters and dramatic suspense, in this century-ago tale of labor rights and wealth inequality readers will find plenty of modern relevance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)