By Anita Diamant
This novel is the delightful first person narrative of a girl born in Boston of Russian Jewish immigrant parents ~1900. Addie's family lives in the multicultural tenement neighborhood of Boston's north end. Her family had to adjust to a new country, then a world war, the great depression, a second world war, and the changes that followed. Addie talks of boyfriends, women's right to vote and women's education. Through triumphs and sorrows, through nearly a century of memories, the narrator maintains a joie de vivre as Addie's audience is her young granddaughter, who has asked Addie to tell her about her life.
I read this story as an audiobook; Linda Lavin's inflection may sound a little more New York than Boston, but she maintains the warmth of a grandmother indulging a beloved granddaughter, inviting her into the secrets of her own long-ago youth.
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