Love's Fool

About the Book

Young John Costane emigrates to America from Ireland, settling in Irontree, Michigan.  After marrying and starting a family, he meets Julia Lafferty, another recent immigrant from Ireland.

John’s wife dies in childbirth, and a mine cave-in leaves Julia a widow.  Must Julia be forced to a poor-house, her five children consigned to an orphanage?  John and Julia make the momentous decision which merges the two families.

Love’s Fool and its companion volume Time’s Fool are the true, epic tale of the author’s own family who came to America in the 1860’s.  In the character of John Costane, the author’s grandfather, it is also a study of obsession.

About the Author

The French, in their tactful Gallic way, refer to women like me as “women of a certain age”. My alma mater is Mount St. Mary’s College, Brentwood, California, where I won poetry prizes. One was for all California colleges and one for a Northwestern conference contest. I have lived in England, Turkey, and briefly in Ireland. I have lived through a California earthquake and a Turkish revolution and have reared five children, as exciting, but not as disastrous, as the other two. I have worked as a reporter, a proofreader, and, on my grandfather’s death, published his weekly newspaper. I have published a book of verse, worked as a Lockheed supervisor, an inspector for the Army Corps of Engineers, and as Southern Pacific’s pullman reservations supervisor. Nowadays I live on California’s Central Coast, and do as little as possible. I write, as it can be done sitting.