I loved the idea of this book, but it took me such a long time to get interested. The writing was good, but it was jam-packed with details that didn't add much to the overall story. I loved the concept of the book, but unfortunately, this one wasn't a winner for me.

There is such a thing as too much detail. The meat of this book was good, but it kept getting lost in the details, which was a bummer. I had a hard time getting into it.

I had a hard time reading this book. I put it down several times and finally just did not finish it. The writing is very good , however I felt the story got bogged down with too many back stories and too much detail. I think it could have been very good if it had been edited to a reasonable 300 page book.

I am a member of the American Library Association Notable Books Council. This title was suggested for the 2018 list. It was not nominated for the award.

A panoramic historical novel with a cinematic feel that follows the lives of three Irish brothers and a huge cast of characters over the course of about a week in June 1939. Brendan Mathews is a particularly able first-time novelist, and although this is a big book with great geopolitical sweep, this reader often felt that she was following the action through a keyhole—peering pleasurably into the past. I love books set in New York City during this period and I read this novel over the course of several months in order to savor Mathews’s thoughtfully imagined pre-World War II Gotham. A skillful debut from a writer to watch. Thank you to the Hachette Group and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book in exchange for an honest review.

OMG!!! The journey I have just been on. WHAT a GREAT story!!! I am typing this with tears in my eyes!

So many characters and so many stories. I was rooting for all the main ones.

A family of brothers whose father was involved in the IRA, a immigrant Jew from Prague with her visa about to expire just when Hitler’s regime had invaded and taken over the country and an African American couple, both very musically inclined and good at it, were dealing with racism and a country trying hard to invent the future during a World’s Fair. An absolutely mesmerizing story that enthralled me and definitely kept my attention.

I did a little something different with this book that I've never done before. I Googled images from 1939 of the Plaza, the World's Fair and street scenes. I can't tell you how much that added to my enjoyment of this book. It's something that I will definitely be doing in the future as sometimes, no fault of the author, I don't get the pictures they are describing.

Again, great read, thoroughly enjoyed!!!

Thanks to Little, Brown and Company and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I really enjoyed this sprawling historical novel set in NYC during the 1939 World's Fair. It's full of colorful and vivid characters and takes us back to a time where there was more optimism about what it meant to live the American dream. The book is a little long and dragged at times, but overall a really good read.

I received this from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

Oh, I really wanted to like this book. It has all the different facets of historical fiction that I adore. But reading it was like slogging through knee deep cement. The story was making no progress and I couldn't grasp onto any interest in the characters.

Abandoned at 22%.

No rating, DNF

Was not able to finish. The story idea was interesting, but I feel he needed an editor.

I'm giving this three stars because, although I wasn't taken with the story, the first hundred pages were well written and witty, with interesting characters. It simply wasn't for me; it didn't hold my attention. However, we have purchased it for the library service. I hope that it finds the reader who will love it.

I love such a fresh view of New York, Such a forgotten time, I felt like I was getting an inside view from an old friend.

BookFilter review: Is "old-fashioned" ever anything but a compliment when it comes to books? Debut author Brendan Mathews delivers an old-fashioned page-turner, using the 1939 World's Fair in New York City to bring together a vivid cast of characters and set them to spinning in a fast-paced plot. From Ireland, an escaped convict and his wayward priest of a brother accidentally blow up an IRA safe house and flee to America with a bag of cash and a cockamamie story about being Scottish royalty for cover. Naturally, they book rooms at the Plaza where the con falls hard for an heiress and the priest struggles to regain his memory. Their brother in the US has just quit his gig in a successful but boring big band for a once in a lifetime dream of starting his own group. Meanwhile, a Jewish refugee from Prague desperately tries to extend her visa and bring her love safely out from under the foot of the Nazis. Oh and the Irish mob wants our con artist to assassinate the King of England at the World's Fair or they'll slaughter his family. That enough story for you? Mathews creates a lot of vivid characters and while everything ends up almost exactly the way you expect/want, it's vivid enough to make you uncertain right up to the finale. The only misstep is a comically detailed postscript in which he explains what happens to everyone in the decades to come in such precise and predictable fashion that you roll your eyes. Why bother? His imagination is rich; he just needs to trust that ours is too. -- Michael Giltz

The World of Tomorrow is a vibrantly written novel, with numerous well-drawn characters and an impressive degree of forward momentum. The author's ambition is portraying a cross-section of individuals from a range of economic classes and political backgrounds is to be commended, though any plot involving so many characters (and across a variety of locales) is bound to become cumbersome at some point. Also inevitably, some individuals will emerge as more compelling to read about than others--Cronin, for example, the reluctant IRA assassin, was for this reader a greater draw than Martin Dempsey, whose travails around a lagging music career simply didn't carry the same charge. In all, I would recommend World of Tomorrow to readers seeking a broad canvas of locales and characters & set in a specific and tumultuous moment in world affairs.

The World of Tomorrow recreates America in 1939, the year of the World's Fair in New York City. It was a time of progress, dreams, and optimism, hot jazz and The Lindy Hop. 

It was also a time of world political unrest, racism, and anti-Semitism. Father Coughlin had a radio broadcast from The Shrine of the Little Flower in Metro Detroit, spewing anti-Semitism.  Cab Calloway was playing in The Cotton Club to a white audience while black maids lined up on the street to be picked up for day jobs, hoping their employer didn't jilt them of their pay. Anti-lynching law petitions were circulating with little hope of impact.

There is talk about Roosevelt's "latest plans for the ruination of the country," taking from the rich to give to the undeserving poor "who still lined up for free soup and stale bread." The Fascism of Italy and Germany could be "exemplary," with business and government working together. Meanwhile in Europe, Hitler was taking over and Italy was embracing Fascism.

The mission of the World's Fair was to "showcase the abundance and industrial might of America's great corporations." Imagine a world with frozen food! A highway system and a car in every garage! And there was the promise of "Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral." But, the real draw at the fair was the Amusement Zone, and especially the Aquacade with women swimming in flesh-colored swimsuits so they appeared nude.

In Ireland, Francis Dempsey was serving a prison term for trafficking in banned books but is allowed to attend his father's funeral. Also at the funeral is his youngest brother Michael, released from the seminary he turned to after his true love married to solve her family's financial problems. 

The boys are 'rescued', supplied with a car and a map to a remote cabin where IRA members make bombs. Francis accidentally sets off the explosives and is left with a shell-shocked Michael and the IRA's stash of money. 

Frances comes up with a First-Class Plan: he assumes a false identity and with Michael they take a ship to America. On board he meets a wealthy New York City family whose daughter falls for his persona, the Scottish Lord Agnus MacFarquhar. Meantime, Michael's memory, speech, and hearing has failed, but the ghost of William Butler Yeats has become his new best friend.

The American gangster Gavigan, whose money Francis has stolen, rouses his retired henchman Cronin to tail Martin Dempsey, brother to Francis and Michael. Martin has been in America ten years, and has a wife and children. He is a musician in love with 'jungle' music. Gavigan believes that Francis deliberately killed his Irish contacts and stole his money. He wants revenge. Cronin is to bring Francis to him.

The Dempsey boys don't know that Cronin was mentored by the Dempsey patriarch, doing that which needed to be done for the IRA. Like cold blooded murder. He hated that Dempsey exploited his baser nature, which he has tried to overcome in his new life with Alice and her son, enjoying the simple life as a farmer. Gavigan threatens Alice's life if Cronin fails.

The set-up is long and perhaps overwritten, but it is full of color and vivid characters, and the writing clever with humorous insights. The story later heats up and drives to a heart-pounding and satisfying ending. I loved the Dempsey brothers.

The belief in an America as a place of fresh starts and miracles to come has become quite the nostalgic dream, or disdained hoax, to many Americans today. The novel takes us to a time when we still believed in a better tomorrow.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

There is so much promise in Brendan Mathews’ The World of Tomorrow. There is a madcap caper driven by Francis who knows how to jump at a chance, fleeing prison during his father’s funeral and taking advantage of an accidental explosion to pick up some cash and new identities for him and his brother Michael. With Michael, we get a hallucinatory dream story, conversations with the ghost of Yeats. They sail for New York to their brother Martin where there is this family story, a marriage challenged by the conflict between responsibility and vocation. Then there is a grim thriller featuring hitman Cronin whose seeking these brothers on behalf of an IRA boss who imagines a grand political assassination. Then there is a comedy of manners featuring the Binghams, revealing the travails of privilege and gossip and the marriage market. With Lilly, we have a glimpse of the rising horror of Nazism and the coming Holocaust. This is a sprawling novel and I can’t help thinking that Mathews could not make up his mind what kind of book he intended to write so he wrote a bit of everything.

The general outline of the story is two brothers fleeing prison and the seminary for a safe house that was already occupied by some IRA bombers of less than stellar accomplishment. They manage to blow themselves up, leaving one brother wounded and the other one alert to the main chance. Grabbing the bomber’s money they head off to New York where their older brother emigrated and where they hope to escape into new lives. They go top class, taking on the identities of Scottish noblemen. An IRA boss dispatches a killer to capture one of the brothers and then sees an opportunity for a terroristic coup at the World’s Fair. Meanwhile, several other things are happening and every character down to the inconsequential get their day, their life history, their hopes, and dreams, are all shared in great detail, even if they barely impinge on the main story.

Meanwhile, several other things are happening and every character down to the inconsequential get their day, their life history, their hopes, and dreams, are all shared in great detail, even if they barely impinge on the main story. Perhaps the most egregious example is the doctor, van Wooten, who has an entire chapter devoted to his frustrated life of medical servitude to the Binghams. He could not exist and the story would not change one whit.



Evaluating a book is always a matter of taste and some people like books that sprawl all over creation. It’s not that I demand books be linear, but I like to think what is in the book is necessary. The long introductions to characters feel like those writing seminar exercises in imagining a character, it’s all backstory and tedious. It is all telling, no showing. Completely realized, fully drawn characters with nothing to do but wait for their stories. But this was not van Wooten’s story and he could have stayed on his index cards. As could a lot of the details on other characters.

The writing varies from imaginative to prosaic. Eyes and gimlet and rituals are arcane. That is disappointing, but when he ventures into more imaginative writing, Mathews can be excellent and then he can be downright silly. I kind of like comparing the first note on the violin to a starter’s pistol in a musical steeplechase, but in the same scene, the writing descends to parody of low-rent romance with Anisette’s pupils contracting and dilating to the music. It was so overblown and florid, I laughed.

I wish I had liked The World of Tomorrow but I did not. I was about two-thirds through the book and considered giving up, but hoped that at least the thriller plot would redeem itself. It did not. It was as anticlimactic and silly as anything. And then, to wrap it all up, we are given a summary of who did what bringing us up to near the present day in the most ridiculous final chapter ever. And now, I have to stop this review, because the more I write, the more I am reminded of what I did not like.

The World of Tomorrow will be released September 5th. I received an advance e-galley from Little Brown, the publisher, through NetGalley.

The World of Tomorrow at Hachette Book Group for Little, Brown and Co.
Brendan Mathews faculty page

I sadly couldn't finish this one. After attempting to get through it for a month (I'm usually at least a book a week reader), I finally gave up.
I was particularly interested in the World's Fair aspects of this book, which I never really got to. There are many many storylines, primarily revolving around 3 Irish brothers (mobsters?) and the hitman who is out to get them. I was hoping for something a little more immersive in its storytelling.
I think I just got bored and decided there are more interesting things out there to read.

The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Matthews also features the World Fair! This one combines everything I love in a good book- Irish immigrants and New York in the 1930’s.

Here’s what you need to know:

June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother Michael are on an ocean liner from Ireland bound for their brother Martin’s home in New York City, having stolen a small fortune from the IRA. During the week that follows, the lives of these three brothers collide spectacularly with big-band jazz musicians, a talented but fragile heiress, a Jewish street photographer facing a return to Nazi-occupied Prague, a vengeful mob boss, and the ghosts of their own family’s revolutionary past.

When Tom Cronin, an erstwhile assassin forced into one last job, tracks the brothers down, their lives begin to fracture. Francis must surrender to blackmail, or have his family suffer fatal consequences. Michael, wandering alone, turns to Lilly Bloch, a heartsick artist, to recover his lost memory. And Martin and his wife, Rosemary, try to salvage their marriage and, ultimately, the lives of the other Dempseys.

From the smoky jazz joints of Harlem to the Plaza Hotel, from the garrets of artists in the Bowery to the shadowy warehouses of mobsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Brendan Mathews brings pre-war New York to vivid, pulsing life, while the sweeping and intricate storytelling of this remarkable debut reveals an America that blithely hoped it could avoid another catastrophic war and focus instead on the promise of the World’s Fair: a peaceful, prosperous “World of Tomorrow.”

I found this confusing--too many characters, too little flow at the beginning and so I gave up on it.

I couldn't finish this book. I kept trying to stay with it but at 47% I was lost. From the beginning I knew it would be challenging because of all of the characters. I felt like I needed a character map to keep it all straight. There were too many people introduced too quickly, it made it very hard to follow. Sometimes the story would switch characters story lines between paragraphs which confused me as well. There needed to be more a distinctive change on the page to separate them. I also kept waiting for the story to maybe pick up or for things to start making sense but they just weren't for me. Maybe others have had other reactions to this book but it just wasn't for me.

What a stunning novel. I loved it, and the author knocked it out of the park. Certainly a major new talent and going to be a huge fall book. The immigration story is so fierce and searing, and NYC is alive. A real stunner.