Thirsty

O’Keeffe chronicles the troubling story of a late 19th-century Croatian émigrée whose expectations that life in a Pittsburgh steel town will brighten her fortunes are harshly dashed. Born and raised on a farm in Croatia, Klara is taken by a handsome young transient, Drago Bozic, who urges her to accompany him to Thirsty, Pa., where his brother works in the steel mills. After the recent death of her mother, Klara wants to flee her grim life, which consists mostly of taking care of her siblings and being battered by her angry father. Yet almost as soon as the affectionate young married couple arrives in Thirsty, Drago grows hard and volatile, beating Klara routinely, and Klara recognizes that she has accepted her mother’s fate. After the one neighbor who steps in during their fights is killed in the mill, Klara is left without a protector, and her inability to leave Drago casts a generational pall over the family, as their daughter also marries a batterer. O’Keeffe’s debut gracefully encapsulates the working-class cycle of poverty and hopelessness in the lives of these hard-laboring, sympathetic wives and mothers. (Oct.)