From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable coming-of-age 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.
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Read this for book club, and I just thought it was SO BORING!
I mean, the first page/paragraph sets up that the question/reason for the book is that she has been asked what made her the woman she is now that she's old.
Yet it didn't feel like this book had a POINT.
I understand that not everybody has to have been SOMEbody, and that it's valid and good that this is a story about a normal girl and she's not extraordinary and neither is her life. But it still could have been told in an interesting way!!
I tried very hard to articulate this at the book club and I think I was not very clear, but here is my attempt now:
Book summary: Grandma tells about her formative years age 15-27ish, giving pretty much equal weight and enthusiasm to all events described.
COULD have been: Peppy Grandma is emotional when recalling moving life experiences, and describes how the friendships she made with strong women during her formative years shaped the interesting and vibrant life she has lived.
I personally felt that the main character's retelling of her life was lackluster. She describes topics that are heavy and that she experienced and that should have shaped her life: finding her sister all bloody because of an "accident" that was really suicide; almost being raped in some dark alley where the guy held her down and got off; brandishing a knife at a drunk guy who is violent, etc. These events are told without a lot of emotion or detail, and I understand that the years of her life have distanced her from these occasions, and that her age may have provided her some time to reflect and view them differently. But they were somehow BORING to read! She dismisses what happens to her and doesn't talk about how it affected her at all.
She described the date where then the guy pins her up against a wall and holds her down and sounds like he humps her until he finishes, but she dismisses this entirely, saying "oh, I now knew what those other girls meant when they said he wasn't a great guy! I was so naive!" and then describes something totally normal like her boring job. Wait, what??
The writing was boring, simple, the character was boring, there wasn't really a plot because it was just about her life. The setting and characters felt a bit flat, like pretty much every early 1900s poor/middle class immigrant story I've ever read. Boston could have been more of a "character" the way New York sometimes feels, but even that was quite weak.
The librarian at my book club said that the first draft of this book was actually a look at girls and their friendships over time as they came multiple summers to visit the lodge at the sea. I would have been way more interested in THAT book, because it would have had a point and even if the girls were all ordinary people, their friendships with each other could have brought some life and emotion to the story.
After reading just a few reviews/comments, the people who say anything more than "I liked it" usually are saying that it felt really realistic for a memory and a retelling, that the point was that it was a sweet grandma telling her story and not a history lesson.
To this I say that yes, I've talked to old people too, and maybe my family are super amazing storytellers, because I found the story about not having a dishwasher and the rent being only 16$ a month WAY more interesting!
Addie mentions dating this guy who has PTSD from WWI, and she is ashamed to be seen with him and then never sees him again after his breakdown. I think it would have been totally okay to insert a minimal of commentary about her life here: about the number of guys available to her, how many vets she dealt with, how people thought of the war and what things were different now versus then.
Addie says that her father is religious, but never talks about her own religious or church experiences, which I thought was weird. She could have easily said something like "oh, I was rebellious-minded, and only went to please my parents/never went because xxxx" but this would have meant that she had to express an opinion, and not a cliche that could be on a needlepoint pillow.
I don't deny that some memories are amazingly well-preserved over time, that was not something I ever thought was bad in this book's case. But my own memories evoke emotion when I remember them, and I find that most people have the ability to tell a story/memory that can evoke emotion.
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