First published 2014
Eighty-five-year-old Addie Baum sits with her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who asks how she became the woman she is today. Addie begins her story in 1915, when she was fifteen and living in a cramped North End tenement with her immigrant parents and two sisters. Her parents fear America's influence on their daughters and cannot understand Addie's dreams of finishing high school and attending college. Addie joins a library group at the local settlement house, where she discovers friends who will shape her future. She navigates her first heartbreak, fights for education against her family's wishes, and embraces the changing opportunities for women in the new century. Through short skirts, movies, and celebrity culture, Addie forges her own path between her parents' old-world values and America's promises. Her story spans decades of transformation, both personal and cultural, as she pursues career ambitions and searches for love while remaining connected to her Jewish identity and family bonds.
Genres: family-life, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, jewish
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Boston, North End
Period: 1915, 20th Century
320 pages · Hardcover · Scribner