The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

9781439199350

333 Pages
Publisher: Scribner
Release Date: December 9, 2014

Fiction, General Fiction (Adult), Historical Fiction, Relationships, Friendships, Families

Addie Baum was born in 1900 to Jewish immigrant parents. She begins the story in 1915 in a library. The book is an account of her life through World War I and II and the Spanish flu epidemic. It is written as if it was told by 85-year-old Addie to her 22-year-old granddaughter.

I absolutely love Addie and her personality. She had amazing life experiences and women that stood with her and for her. We see the good and bad relationships with her older sisters, her mother, a librarian, and women news writers. The author wrote the story so well, I wanted to research Addie Baum and read her book. This is a book I will recommend over and over to everyone that enjoys books with strong women characters.

While I enjoyed this book from a historical perspective and as someone who has been to Boston a lot, I found the story slow and just never got going. I kept hoping it would pick up but it never did.

I adored The Boston Girl. It is the story of Addie - a young, 1st generation Jewish girl who is living in America and trying to discover who she is meant to be and navigate in a world so very alien from what her family once knew. A difficult feat in any situation but even more so in a world that is rapidly changing as it was at the birth of the 20th century.
Addie recounts her life with all the struggles that you would expect a young woman to go through - growing up, love, relationships, family drama, death and much more but with the additional cultural difficulties to make it just that little bit harder.
What is brilliant is that Addie's life journey parallels history - the war, the pandemic etc and because of her story, as a reader you get intimate details of all the historical drama.
The Boston Girl is brilliant. An absolute gem of a book.

A great immigrant story will introduce the reader to Jewish immigrants in the United States. The first person narrative brought the imagery alive as Addie told of the anti-Semitism she encountered.

I greatly enjoyed the voice of this book. The atmosphere was spot on and the relationships between the characters beautifully complex and explored with purpose. The plot was interesting and drew the reader in to the time period. And overall accomplished and interesting read.

I picked up Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl as an in-between read, you know, one of those titles you crack open to ‘cleanse the palate’ between heavier fare? I was in the market for something light and it looked like it’d fit the bill so I pulled it up on my kindle and dug in. I’d no expectations and had no prior experience with the author’s work, so I was a surprised as anyone when the novel swept me clean off my feet.

The book is written in the first person and as a result, feels intensely intimidate. Addie is an irresistibly candid character with a sparkling sense of humor and her earnest account of her life experiences grant the novel a unique degree of emotional depth. I read historic fiction for the history, but even I can’t deny that the emotional elements of the story are what set The Boston Girl apart.

Thematically the book has a lot going on and I admire how it explores immigration as a long-term prospect with implications that ripple across generations. Addie grows up in family environment that is rooted in old world traditions, but the multicultural neighborhood of Boston’s North End has an influence all its own. Addie is a product of both and I think the novel invites understanding of what that experience really means for those who live it.

Heartfelt and emotive, The Boston Girl isn’t to be missed. A beautiful and highly recommended read.

When asked "How did you get to be the woman you are today?" by her granddaughter, 85 year old Addie Baum recalls her life growing up in Boston as the youngest and only American born child of immigrant parents.

I will tell you now, there is nothing profound here, no point to the story, no moral, so if this is what you are looking for, you will not find it here. But if you enjoy a good life story, particularly an immigrant story during the WWII era, this is for you, and there is an added bonus of the story being told by a funny and fiesty Yiddish grandmother. I laughed, I cried, and reminisced about my own immigrant family. I think we often forget that our elderly were once young and vibrant as well.

Anita Diamant has a way with words. I cannot wait to read her other stories.