The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

This is an awesome book – very entertaining – and well-written.  I couldn’t put it down – read it straight through over two days.

It’s a lucky day 4-leaf clover book at the library.

It is a brilliant fictional memoir, which is something Diamant does really well (Red Tent).  The style is a series of vignettes mainly focused on a woman’s early youth, but rapidly spanning years as we head to the present.  She is relaying the story of her life to her 22-year old grand-daughter.  Even with that passage of time, “current” is 1985.  If I didn’t love this book so much, I’d say she simply used the structure of “Red Tent” and rewrote the specific vignettes, updated to three millennia later.

But so what, Robert Parker did that for dozens and dozens of remakes of Spencer novels and I loved every one of them.

Diamant writes about Jewish history and family life.  In this book it is immigrant life at the juncture of the 19^th & 20^th centuries; WW-I and the depression.

 

 

I go through a lot of books each month, but currently I’m distracted and have been skipping reads. 

After the first few pages of this book, however, I was hooked – captivated by her story-telling.