Here they are folks…the last two books that I have read in 2017! I officially have read 52 books this year, or approximately one a week. When things settle down in January, look out for a post about how reading only women authors for a year changed my perspective on what it means to be a woman in this day and age, and how reading women authors can help both men and women understand the pressures and discrimination we face on a daily basis. But one thing I already know is that I won’t be stopping this resolution just because the year is changing. #readwomenauthors
“The Silver Star,” Jeanette Walls
This novel follows two sisters as they embark on a journey not only to escape their present, but also to discover their past and be able to embrace their future. After their mother leaves them on their own and social services start to come around, the girls decide to high tail it from California, where they live, to Virginia, where their uncle lives. Although they haven’t seem him since they were toddlers, it’s the only choice they have, and they come to embrace life with each other. Through their eyes we see the racial politics of the 1960s and how little some things have changed since then. Same shit, different decade, one might say.
“The Boston Girl,” Anita Diamant
“The Boston Girl” is about exactly what it sounds like: the life is a woman who was born and raised and live her whole life in Boston at beginning of the 20th century. Born of immigrants from an unnamed Eastern European country, Addie is a Jewish girl and the first of the family to be born in the U.S. She grows up different from her sisters but has much in common with them all the same: she has a streak of rebellion in her; what today we would call independence. But back then, it was frowned upon in the strictest sense. In Addie we see a role model for us all: she read books, saw movies, learned as much as she could, finished high school and later university as an adult learner, and put her career and herself before any relationship or any man. And she was the better for it.