One of my favorite ways to rest is by curling up with a good book. Like movies and music, all genres appeal to me, and I give all my books a shot. There are a few ways I find new books to read: Goodreads, my two book clubs, friends’ recommendations, and browsing the internet. My favorite author is Greg Iles, and the books I am most interested in reading are nonfiction books about the Holocaust.
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The Boston Girl
Last week I read The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant. This book was on my Book Club’s reading list, and it was chosen because it was on the summer reading list. Overall, it was not a bad choice.
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About the book
Taken from the Amazon website:
“Anita Diamant’s “vivid, affectionate portrait of American womanhood” (Los Angeles Times), follows the life of one woman, Addie Baum, through a period of dramatic change. Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, 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. 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, to finding the love of her life, eighty-five-year-old Addie recounts her adventures with humor and compassion for the naïve girl she once was.
Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made 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. “Diamant brings to life a piece of feminism’s forgotten history” (Good Housekeeping) in this “inspirational…page-turning portrait of immigrant life in the early twentieth century” (Booklist).“
About the Author
Taken from the Amazon website:
“In my first novel, The Red Tent, I re-imagined the culture of biblical women as close, sustaining, and strong, but I am not the least bit nostalgic for that world without antibiotics, or birth control, or the printed page. Women were restricted and vulnerable in body, mind, and spirit, a condition that persists wherever women are not permitted to read.
When I was a child, the public library on Osborne Terrace in Newark, New Jersey, was one of the first places I was allowed to walk to all by myself. I went every week, and I can still draw a map of the children’s room, up a flight of stairs,where the Louisa May Alcott books were arranged to the left as you entered.
Nonfiction, near the middle of the room, was loaded with biographies. I read several about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Helen Keller, with whom I share a birthday.
But by the time I was 11, the children’s library was starting to feel confining,so I snuck downstairs to the adult stacks for a copy of The Good Earth. (I had overheard a grown-up conversation about the book and it sounded interesting.)The librarian at the desk glanced at the title and said I wasn’t old enough for the novel and furthermore my card only entitled me to take out children’s books.
I defended my choice. I said my parents had given me permission, which was only half a fib since my mother and father had never denied me any book. Eventually,the librarian relented and I walked home, triumphant. I had access to the BIG LIBRARY. My world would never be the same.”
Visit Anita Diamant’s author page on Amazon.
My Review
The Boston Girl was a great book! Easy read, but emotionally appealing (happy and sad) and draws in the reader to another time and place. The author makes lovable characters, and you can’t help loving Addie Baum. Addie is the woman you hope to be – open minded, loving, carefree, insightful, and all the other positive qualities a strong, independent woman has. Perfect ending, and a real page turner. Wonderful read, and looking forward to reading other novels by Anita Diamant.
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Conclusion
On Goodreads, I gave this book 4 out of five stars.
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