The book was archived before our group could download it. We are sure that we would have enjoyed the book judging from the reviews it has received.

I have to admit I was not a fan of this book and had to DNF it. I don't know why but I think the style of writing was just not for me which is a shame as the premise was really good.

Loved the writing and the premise, found the pace a little slow so unfortunately didn't enjoy the book as much as I expected to, but that's my personal taste and readers who enjoy a gentle pace will love this excellent novel

I expected a warm Irish saga a bit like a Cathy Kelly, but it was totally unlike this.
It Is a US Irish tale of, Zi think, the 1950s.
When Kindle problems kept jumping both back and forwards and I couldn't tell the difference I gave up on this depressing, seedy saga

The death of one person changes many lives, and this is explored beautiful in The Ninth Hour. Lifetimes and stories entangle to produce another great McDermott book.

I'm months late with this review but that's because after my ARC expired, I decided to give it one more chance. Actually got the book from a library & tried again. And yet, it's still too dull for me to make myself finish it... I saw the writing in this described as "subtle, quiet storytelling" but for me, personally, it was simply boring and too focused on unimportant details. Truly a shame since I had such high expectations.

For a period in my early 20s I worked as a caregiver to mentally handicapped adults who lived in halfway houses. These extraordinary women and men all required a varying amount of care, supervision and companionship. Often the work felt rewarding and enlivening, but sometimes it could be overwhelmingly upsetting and draining. In those dark moments it felt futile and insignificant. I mention this only because something I think Alice McDermott captures so powerfully in this novel is the sense of ambiguity that comes with the compulsion to “do good” vs the daily physical reality of providing care. The novel follows one family’s involvement with a nunnery in NYC where this band of Sisters regularly go out into the community to collect money for the poor, provide service to those in need and intervene in troubled situations. “The Ninth Hour” primarily follows the life of a girl named Sally born in a tragic situation and her heartrending struggles with faith and helping others in her journey to adulthood.

McDermott has a beguiling way of writing so eloquently about very dark scenes. The opening section is about a man’s suicide, but alongside the cold truth of his actions she imbues her prose with all the desperately conflicted feelings he has as he takes this decisive act. She ends this section in the most fascinating way by revealing the narrator is a collective group of descendants from this man. The novel traces the successive generations that follow this tragic man while also exploring the Sisterhood that assists this family in peril. I found this confusing at some times as it’s slightly difficult to decipher the relationships of some characters and the timeframe which any particular section is placed within. But it ultimately builds to a comprehensive picture of a family tree that could have so easily died out if fate had altered its course and the Sisters hadn’t been there.

The work of the nuns is accompanied by a lot of morally ambiguous situations. Here the dogmas of faith are tested against the real needs of people in a changing society. Some of the nuns follow their own sense of goodness and others stick to the “rules” of religion as have been traditionally practiced. I was struck by the complex way McDermott writes about how faith is uniquely expressed in different individuals. Sister St. Saviour comes across as a quiet pioneer whose sense of justice for women overcomes misogynistic authority: “In her thirty-seven years of living in this city, Sister had collected any number of acquaintances who could surmount the many rules and regulations – Church rules and city rules and what Sister Miriam called the rules of polite society – that complicated the lives of women: Catholic women in particular and poor women in general.” It’s so heartbreaking how she’s portrayed as someone who works tirelessly when she sees people in need even if she’s already physically and mentally exhausted herself. I admire the complexity the author gives to these characters and their faith and shows the personal impact their devoted service has upon them.

It felt like one of the points of this novel is to restore feeling back into the cold branches of a family tree. McDermott states at one point in the narrative that “History was easy: the past with all loss burnt out of it, all sorrow worn out of it – all that was merely personal comfortably removed.” To really know and understand the struggles that Sally endures before producing a family, the story vividly shows her painfully calamitous train journey to become a nun in Chicago and the excruciating service she provides to a bad-tempered disabled woman. I was entranced by her journey and the conflicts she worked through to arrive where she belongs. This is the first time I’ve read Alice McDermott and I’ll be eager to read more.

The Ninth Hour was a lovely book-delicate and lightly told but evocative and almost immersive. (Such skill) I didn't expect to enjoy time spent with nuns but this is a refreshing take on the somewhat traveled path of early 20th century Irish New York. A favorite read this year

Set in 1940s and ‘50s Brooklyn, this tale of three generations of an Irish immigrant family centres mostly on the lives of Annie and her daughter Sally. Sally’s father takes his own life before she is born and it is only through the kindness of a group of local nuns that Annie is able to support herself and her daughter, having left all her family back in Ireland. Sally is a convent child, growing up in its hallways, constantly surrounded by nuns, which leads to her romanticising a life of religious dedication.
The nuns are of an order that goes into the community and nurses those who need help. They deal with the most distressing and grotesque of illnesses and conditions with humility and generosity but each nun has their own history and personality and learning about these is fascinating. Sister Jeanne is warm and generous to a fault, while Sister Lucy is sharp and no-nonsense but sees to people’s hearts.
This is a beautifully written and constructed novel about faith and humanity. There are hints of Colm Toibin in McDermott’s style and setting and she is every bit as good a writer as he is. Stunning.

Sorry I missed the date for this.

I really enjoyed the book - thank you.

https://www.librarything.com/work/19542368

Beautiffully crafted, intelligent and full of soul. This Brooklyn-based novel is an intimate story of duty, faith and family. Annie’s husband is dead befor her daughter Sally is born. Their lives are entwined with those of the holy Sisters in the neighbourhood, the chaotic bit tight-knit Tierney’s and the tragic Mrs Costello. Though set in a few small streets the impact of these lives stretch beyond the years and in that regard this novel has epic qualities.

Thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley.

I really enjoyed this book, particularly for Alice McDermott’s ability to write connections. The Ninth Hour is full of connections; the networks of nuns all over the US, the Irish community in New York, the way that different kinds and groups of people can come together, or how new relationships can be forged. And, of course, the way that one event – seemingly isolated – can have ripples that last for years afterwards, which stretch far wider than one would expect.

It jumps around from past to present – sometimes fleshing out the details, sometimes only giving the reader a glimpse of how each moment is connected to another. In this way, the book is like water – ebbing and flowing, and people and actions and time all moving as one. It reminds us that nothing and nobody is isolated.

Alice McDermott’s beautifully written and closely observed portrait of an Irish-American community in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century is a real joy. Told with compassion, insight and the occasional flash of humour, reading it is a deeply rewarding experience. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor work amongst the most disadvantaged people in the neighbourhood, willingly taking on the most unpleasant tasks of caring for the sick and dying. But these are not the sort of nuns that we all too often read about, cruel and judgemental and lacking empathy. These really are good women who do their best in sometimes appalling circumstances. When they come across Annie whose husband has just committed suicide, and who is pregnant, they take her in and give her a job in the convent laundry. This too is not one of the cruel laundries of Irish Catholic tradition, but a place where Annie and her daughter Sally are cared for and where Sally can grow up safely – and loved. Narrated retrospectively by an unnamed adult child of Sally, this is not, however, a romanticised and nostalgic look back at an often very harsh past. These nuns never flinch from the messiness, the sickness, the pain, the disorder of the lives of the people they care for, and nor can the reader. Descriptions are vivid and visceral. They nuns never blame but just get on with whatever needs to be done, however unpleasant. McDermott describes the daily grind of often heroic women dealing with the ordinariness of life, but who still manage to find love and grace whatever the circumstances. I loved this gentle but powerful novel and found it compelling and deeply moving.

I really enjoyed this book and it was extremely well written. I love books based in New York with Irish protagonists. It was an extremely sad book and quite dark. I would have liked to hear more about Sally but on the whole an enjoyable read.

Wonderings, interactions in city and vocation in service as a nun.
If you like a great quality of sentences and spotlight on lives in service of others devoutly.
Prose poetic and sentences that display great order of words displaying characters, deciphering odd passages of time, peculiarities and melancholy passage of time, a low meandering haunting tale of things past, failings and hopes, beliefs, lives doings and undoings.
Something that will have something to ruminate in one heart and mind.
She may have you think about past masters like with Joyce’s Dubliners and Flannery O’Connor’s writings.
Irish American characters and catholic things with some death, with some very human traits of vulnerabilities and temptations, with devotions to God and love to people in the balance with tragedy.

Yesterday I finished The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. I really enjoyed the story and the writing. The book opens with the suicide of a young immigrant man, who leaves behind his pregnant wife. The nuns help this woman and you follow Annie, her daughter and the nuns and there work. The story was written very realistically, wich I really liked. Some of the parts we're told from the furture, wich I enjoyed less. But I really enjoyed reading this, so it got 4⭐️.

The synopsis of this book sounded very good indeed but I just simply didn't enjoy it at all. First chapter started off fine but thereafter it seemed to double back repeatedly on itself, so much so I found myself more skim reading than reading it.

I really loved the character of Sally and I found her story to be really interesting. However I would have preferred more of a focus just on this character with less of the nuns and the other stories that sometimes cropped up. I also found the narrative voice of a future generation didn't quite work for me.

At first I thought that this was a series of short stories that linked together, but as I read on, the narrative knitted together and ended up as a coherent whole. It is set in Brooklyn, after the second world war, and deals with an order of nuns who minister to the poor and sick, interfering in a kindly way with people's lives, believing themselves to be secure in a blissful afterlife, while the families they deal with are condemned by their own actions to a worse fate. The beginning describes the hopeless poverty of the people in a graphic and oppressing way, but the style of writing is compelling. Not to give away the ending, I will say it is satisfactory and the epilogue explains some stray threads.