The Boston Girl by Anita
Diamant – Discussed on Wed. Oct. 5, 2016 at the Geneseo Public Library
This plot included many characters and Boston locations. Our readers wished for a Boston map to better follow the activities. The main character, Addie, was telling her family history (from early 1900 to approx.. 1970) in an interview to her granddaughter. We liked learning how the big events (flu epidemic, WWI and WWII) affected her personal life. Also we learned about Jewish culture. Most of our reading group liked this book.
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.
This plot included many characters and Boston locations. Our readers wished for a Boston map to better follow the activities. The main character, Addie, was telling her family history (from early 1900 to approx.. 1970) in an interview to her granddaughter. We liked learning how the big events (flu epidemic, WWI and WWII) affected her personal life. Also we learned about Jewish culture. Most of our reading group liked this book.
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