The Boston Girl
by Anita Diamant
(336 pages)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night,
comes an unforgettable novel about family ties and values, friendship
and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in
Boston in the early twentieth century.
Addie Baum is The Boston
Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and
suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing
up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s
intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t
imagine—a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new
opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of
going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old
Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old
granddaughter, who has asked her “How did you get to be the woman you
are today.” She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made
friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room
tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the
library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to
her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with
compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.
Written
with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance
that made Anita Diamant’s previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl
is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth
century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding
their places in a changing world.
No comments:
Post a Comment