Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The Boston Girl 

by Anita Diamant

 


The Boston Girl 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.


My Review:


I am on such a roll with fabulous historical fiction books this month. I have yet to read one that has disappointed me. The Boston Girl is no exception. 

To put it plainly it is simply a beautiful story about the life of an Russian-American Jewish girl growing up at the beginning of the 20th century in Boston. The story is told by the Boston girl herself - Addie Baum. She is now 85 years old (in 1985) and she is telling her grand daughter Eva the story of how she became the woman she is today. We learn about the challenges of not only being a Jewish girl in the North East during a time of immigration to the U.S. from places like Russia and Europe but we also learn what it was like to simply be a girl in that time. The expectations to be married and to be seen but not heard. This posed to be a challenge for Addie as she was smart and she was inquisitive. 

The overall feeling I got from her story and from her as a character is that she absolutely loved life. It made me think about how important it is to listen to the stories of those who came before us. I know that growing up, I loved hearing my grandmother's stories and if my parents were living, I would want them to share their story with my kids. You can have all of the technology and science in the world and that is a good thing, but without those stories being passed down we as humans don't know who we are and why we are here. I loved the simplicity of Addie's story not just for its basic beauty and truth but because of its relevance and importance to every woman that came after her. I can't say enough about Anita Diamant's The Boston Girl. Throughout the book and through to the end I had a big smile on my face and that is something not every book can do.

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