The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Anita Diamant
• Title: The Boston Girl
• Publisher: ‎ Scribner; First Scribner Hardcover Edition (December 9, 2014)
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover – 322 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 1439199353
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1439199350
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 6.2 x 1.2 x 9.50 inches
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Excellent
• Edition: First Scribner Hardcover Edition

Synopsis:

New York Times bestseller!

An unforgettable novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, told “with humor and optimism…through the eyes of an irresistible heroine” (People)—from the acclaimed author of The Red Tent.

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.

Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made 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. “Diamant brings to life a piece of feminism’s forgotten history” (Good Housekeeping) in this “inspirational…page-turning portrait of immigrant life in the early twentieth century” (Booklist).

About the Author:

Anita Diamant…

In my first novel, THE RED TENT, I re-imagined the culture of biblical women as close, sustaining, and strong despite the fact that, in most ways, they were restricted and vulnerable in body, mind, and spirit. My new book, PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE, takes on women's bodies and freedom in an entirely different way.

When the movie, Period. End of Sentence. won an Oscar in 2019, the film’s producer and founder of The Pad Project, Melissa Berton, told the audience: “A period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education.”

Inspired by the documentary, my collection of essays describes the cultural roots of menstrual injustice and how it erodes self-esteem, limits opportunities and even threatens lives. But the also book celebrates a new generation of activists and innovators working to end period poverty and stigma, and also explores the emerging world of period products, advertising, activism art, and comedy.

When I was a child, the public library on Osborne Terrace in Newark, New Jersey, was one of the first places I was allowed to walk to all by myself. I went every week, and I can still draw a map of the children's room, up a flight of stairs, where the Louisa May Alcott books were arranged to the left as you entered.

Nonfiction, near the middle of the room, was loaded with biographies. I read several about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Helen Keller, with whom I share a birthday.

But by the time I was 11, the children's library was starting to feel confining, so I snuck downstairs to the adult stacks for a copy of The Good Earth. (I had overheard a grown-up conversation about the book and it sounded interesting.)The librarian at the desk glanced at the title and said I wasn't old enough for the novel and furthermore my card only entitled me to take out children's books.

I defended my choice. I said my parents had given me permission, which was only half a fib since my mother and father had never denied me any book. Eventually, the librarian relented and I walked home, triumphant. I had access to the BIG LIBRARY. My world would never be the same.