Book Review of The Unkillable Kitty O'Kane by Colin Falconer

Goodreads Summary: When fiery and idealistic Kitty O’Kane escapes the crushing poverty of Dublin’s tenements, she’s determined that no one should ever suffer like she did. As she sets out to save the world, she finds herself at the forefront of events that shaped the early twentieth century. While working as a maid, she survives the sinking of the Titanic. As a suffragette in New York’s Greenwich Village, she’s jailed for breaking storefront windows. And traveling war-torn Europe as a journalist, she’s at the Winter Palace when it’s stormed by the Bolsheviks. Ultimately she returns to her homeland to serve as a nurse in the Irish Civil War.

During Kitty’s remarkable journey, she reunites with her childhood sweetheart, Tom Doyle, but Tom doesn’t know everything about her past—a past that continues to haunt her. Will Kitty accept that before she can save everyone else, she needs to find a way to save herself? Or will the sins of her past stop her from pursuing her own happiness?

Goodreads Rating: 3.96 stars with over 500 reviews

Genre listing: Historical Fiction

Get the Book: Amazon, Book Depository

2017 Reading Challenge: 21. A book published in 2017

Review:

I recently signed up for Kindle First, and The Unkillable Kitty O'Kane by Colin Falconer was one of the books I picked on there. For those of you who do not know, Kindle First is a great way to get your hands on a free e-book a month! These books are either just released or will be released soon. This particular book will be released on December 1, 2017. Be sure to check it out!

I started out really liking The story of Kitty O'Kane. The book starts out in the early 1900s when she's 10 years old. She has a sad and abusive past and it really made me instantly feel for her and want her to overcome that. I also like how fiery she was and the love that Tom Doyle had for her. 

I also really enjoyed the chapters where Kitty was on the Titanic. I liked the idea of her running away to do something with herself instead of staying in Dublin and living a life of poverty. I would have liked to know more about her relationship with Danny however. After the Titanic is where the story started to lose me.

I felt like she lost herself when she was with Lincoln. I think most of her actions and thoughts were because of him. It read to me like her activism and becoming a journalist was to please him, and not necessarily because she wanted it. I think that any time she tried to say that's what she wanted it was more to convince herself of it as well. During most of the book she completely lost her spunk. 

I honestly got tired of reading all of the politics. I'm not overly political to start with, but this aspect of the book just droned on and on. Combine this with the fact that her actions read like she was trying to please Lincoln, it felt like more like his story than Kitty's. I was also disappointed that she wasn't the one to write something calling her the Unkillable Kitty O'Kane. Again, that was Lincoln. For me I think it would have been a more powerful story if she had gone through all of these things since leaving Dublin and wrote it herself, from her perspective.

Kitty did not feel like a very strong female character to me at all, after the Titanic. In addition to Lincoln running her life, she needed what's his gangster face to save her from prison. About the only time I really feel like she saved herself was in leaving gangster-face (I can't remember his name. Flash?Clearly, he wasn't that memorable for me.)

I think that The Unkillable Kitty O'Kane had a lot of potential, but fell short. The pieces were there for her to be this badass female character, but it was drowned out with politics and chalking up her survival to luck.