The Home and Garden Emporium: A Novel of Resilience, Friendship and Second Chances by Carolyn Niethammer captures the essence of life just before and during World War 1. The story is written in first-person and begins in 1917.
As an Irish immigrant, Ellie has fought prejudice throughout her life. Her bitter, widowed mother works at her brother’s laundry shop in New York, and after graduating from high school Ellie works there, too. Later, she finds satisfying work in a haberdashery and learns that she is adept at selling goods to satisfied customers. At the age of twenty-six she meets and soon marries a handsome bachelor, Edward Smithfield, who works at a bank. They live in Edward’s lovely New York townhouse.
Shortly after they married, Edward receives word that a favorite uncle in Tucson, Arizona is ill and his aunt needs Edward to come. By the time Ellie and Edward arrive in Tucson the uncle has died and his wife, Aunt Clara, needs assistance. In the meantime, the world is becoming aware that Europe is threatened with imminent war, that German soldiers are marching through Belgium. Edward is especially alarmed because he has close childhood friends in Belgium. He feels he must go to Europe to help them, and enlists in the Allied Forces, leaving Ellie in Tucson to deal with his newly widowed aunt and his uncle’s hardware store.
When Ellie goes to the hardware store, she finds a dirty, neglected closed-up store with a calendar dated 1914. Edward is off to war and Aunt Clara, a demanding and standoffish woman, is no help at all. Ellie feels compelled to do what she can but hardly knows where to begin. She isn’t familiar with hardware, the building is filthy, and funds are short.
Good things start happening in Ellie’s life when she meets and befriends multi-ethnic people. She also benefits from meeting some of Aunt Clara’s neighbors. From one she learns the art of gardening, the tools needed and the value of sharing this knowledge. From another, she receives encouragement and friendship with the woman and her handsome son, Anton Lincoln.
The Home and Garden Emporium is a lovely story of new beginnings and the courage it takes to make a giant leap from the familiar to the completely unknown. I enjoyed reading about pre-war and World War I attitudes and living conditions. Many of the customs, attitudes and moral values we now take for granted weren’t common to people in the early Twentieth Century. But the qualities that mattered then, such as friendships, loyalty and innovative hard work, are still worthy traits in our lives. This novel emphasis the worth of those values.