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BOOK REVIEW
By Erin E. Schmidt
Mishawaka Press
In last month’s book review, I brought you Drink to the Lasses by my Saint Mary’s College classmate Mary Beth Ellis. This month, Notre Dame gets its turn in the literary spotlight.
When Shadows Fell at Notre Dame ($14.95 from iUniverse) is the second novel from journalist and Notre Dame alumnus Peter K. Connolly.
As the novel opens, 70-year-old Mark Haverty is having a heart attack. As he tries to decide what to do, he remembers the events of fifty years ago, during his days at Notre Dame. “Try as I might,” he says to himself, “I’ve never been able to blot out the images of that night.”
“That night,” the reader will come to find out, was both terrifying and life-changing for young Mark. But before he has to face it, he arrives on campus as a naive freshman from New York state. Mark must cope with the academic and religious rigors of Notre Dame, back in the days when the university was exclusively male and attending church services was not optional. Mark’s grades, and his party-hearty roommates, are his biggest concern before a routine journalism assignment leads him to a worldly South Bend librarian named Barb. Barb holds the key to a mystery dating back to Notre Dame’s founding.
Clearly, Connolly did extensive research into Notre Dame history to write this novel, lending his fiction an almost documentary-like feel. Familiar details about South Bend, such as the Polish-speaking priests of St. Casimir’s, are also sprinkled liberally through the book.
So are clever literary references. Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen” will never be the same again. For me, the icing on the cake came at the beginning of chapter two. Mark finds out that his room number in Breen-Phillips Hall is 451, and thinks immediately of Ray Bradbury’s story “The Fireman” (later to become Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Fahrenheit 451).
A novelist who loves Notre Dame, knows South Bend (even if it is the South Bend of a bygone era) and reads the American classics is bound to tell a good story. When Shadows Fell at Notre Dame is certainly that.
