The Boston Girl

I've read a couple of books by Anita Diamant (The Red Tent, and The Last Days of Dogtown), but her most recent, The Boston Girl, is by far my favorite. I listened to the audio version read by Linda Lavin, who was absolutely perfect doing the first-person narration.

Addie Balm is the daughter of Jewish immigrants, born in 1900 in Boston. She relates her life story focusing on her teen years and early twenties, basically from the onset of puberty to her marriage.

I loved hearing about life in Boston in the first decades of the 20th century, particularly the Saturday Club, where daughters of various immigrant groups came together to recreate, relax, form friendships, and try out leadership roles. I also loved learning about Rockport Lodge, where young women could spend a week relaxing and learning about nature and the world outside of the city.  I read an article about the book and it seems that Rockport Lodge was the inspiration behind the novel, which makes perfect sense to me.

And, of course, I loved hearing about Addie's work as first a typist, then a copy editor, then a writer for a magazine.  One of my favorite books is James Thurber's The Years With Ross, about Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker. While the publication Addie worked for is no New Yorker, the vibe of the newsroom brought back fond memories of Thurber's memoir.

The characters in The Boston Girl are marvelous--the contrast between Addie's two older sisters, Betty and Celia, is interesting to think about--both were immigrants like their parents--one embraced the new world and the other couldn't. Addie's parents, her brother-in-law, and especially her friends are complex, interesting, flawed, and very real. And then there are her mentors--the women who invest their time and money into helping younger women find a way out of poverty and powerlessness so they can live rich, fulfilling lives. Addie's own mother was an  anchor, and not in a good way, but Addie found surrogate mothers who showed her that she had talent and worth and helped her at key points in her life.

Finally, the historical events and how they shaped lives were fascinating to read about--the sweat shops, the Great War, the Spanish flu, prohibition--they all are a factor in Addie's life.

Wonderful book--one of my favorites so far this year. It is full of energy and hope, tempered with pragmatism. Addie is a heroine that reminds me of Francie Nolan, of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I've had a particularly good run lately of really great books--books that it seems everybody but me had read and loved--and Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the latest in the string of winners.

While I've heard of this book for years, I didn't seriously consider reading it until I went to one of Erin Blakemore's events in Boulder promoting her wonderful book of essays The Heroine's Bookshelf, and heard her talk so passionately about how much she loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and what it's meant in her life to reread it time and again. Since I resonated so strongly with so many of Blakemore's heroines, I figured I better give Francie Nolan, the heroine from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a chance.

A business trip two weeks ago, and really boring in-flight movies for the two four-hour plane rides, enabled me quality time with the book, and I loved it. When I got back home, I couldn't read anything else until I finished it.

For those who, like me, who never met Francie during their adolescence, the book is a novel based roughly on the life of Betty Smith and recounts a life of poverty, hardship, faith, hope and love in the Brooklyn tenements of the early twentieth century. Francie's father is an Irish singing/waitor who drinks himself to an early grave but teaches his daughter about love and loyalty, the power of dreams, and the power of music. Her mother is hardworking, practical, and teaches her how to survive, how to hold her head up, and how to fight for what matters to her.

There is much in the story that is tough to read--it is gritty and often sad, but never dull and often inspiring. It was fascinating to read about the world of pre-WWI Brooklyn, where kids gather junk to sell for a penny or two of spending money and they have to shop for food and haggle with shopkeepers because their parents are working. The life of the average child, the average family one hundred years ago was so much harder, more precarious, and more dangerous than the life of the average child/family today, and this book drove that home in so many ways.

One of the reasons that so many of us life-long readers relate to Francie so strongly is that she is a reader as well. Early in life, she discovered that reading can help to heal a wounded soul and can fuel ambition, satisfy restlessness, open doors to opportunities, and offer companionship when loneliness strikes.

Well-written, easy to read, it's easy to see why this book is so beloved and why Francie Nolan is a heroine on the same plane as Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley. It was interesting, however, to read this book for the first time as an adult. When I read Blakemore's essay on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in her The Heroine's Bookshelf, I was surprised by how harshly she viewed Francie's mother, Katie, talking about Katie's stated preference for Francie's younger brother, Neeley, and her insistence that Francie quit school to go to work to help support the family. While these things are true about Katie, as a mother, I can't help but admire the steeliness of Katie who teaches her children how to survive and thrive.

Katie transforms her maternal instincts into energy that puts food on the table, keeps a roof over the children's heads, instills them with a religious faith, and educates them.

As much as I want to love Francie as a heroine, to me, Katie is the real heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I've been looking for a movie adaptation. The most readily available is the Elia Kazan version from 1945, just two years after the book was published, and which won numerous Oscars. There was a 1974 made-for-TV version that used the same screenplay, but I think I'll go for the older movie.

Mailbox Monday

A couple of weeks ago I went to Erin Blakemore's reading/signing of her new book, The Heroine's Bookshelf, and she said that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is her favorite book. Since my taste and Erin's in literary heroines seems to jive, I figured I was doing myself a disservice by not reading this coming-of-age classic by Betty Smith.

I'm happy to say that I ordered it and it arrived last week, and has leap-frogged several other very worthy books on my TBR shelf.

I was inspired by all my fellow bloggers doing the RIP challenge and even though I didn't sign up for the challenge officially this year, I decided to read a few of the mysteries that have been taking up TBR shelf space for way too long. One was Blood Lure, in the Nevada Barr series that features park ranger Anna Pigeon. I enjoyed it so much that I ordered and received the next in the series, Hunting Season. So much for freed up TBR shelf space!

I found out about reincarnation series by M.J. Rose on another blog, and since I love time travel stories, I thought this might be a great new adventure for me. The first book, The Reincarnationist, arrived last week.

Finally, I reordered and received a book I read and loved and lost many years ago--Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, by Phyllis Rose. It profiles Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Since I recently read about Charles Dickens and his mistress, Nelly Ternan, and I'm about to continue reading stuff by and about George Eliot, the timing for rereading this couldn't be better.