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Away
Amy Blooom
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"I read Away by Amy Bloom because it was a birthday gift.
Away is the portrait of, it takes place in the 20's, 1925, and it's a portrait of a young women who emigrated from Russia. Her whole family, she's Jewish, and they'd all been slaughtered, and she was able to, she survived and feels she has nothing left there, so she emigrates to New York, kind of looks up a cousin who had sent sort of a broad letter out to anybody who needed shelter to come there, and it starts, it's her life beginning in New York City and her attempt to kind of gain independence but always having memories of her daughter that she had tried to make sure she got away from the attack, and she's not sure if she did, if she didn't, is the alive? So that question is kind of ongoing throughout. So this is her life in America.
There's not a lot of books out there, at least that I've come across, about life in the 20's, and this was life in the 20's, not the typical gangster/prohibition/flapper side of it, but rather someone struggling to work, and a woman, and generally you'd think of that long ago that women can't be independent, you know they're always gonna fall into the - they're either high-esteem society women who don't work or they're street people. So it's interesting to be able to see that and how her relationship towards men at that time, but she ends up traveling. I don't want to give away the plot, but she ends up traveling across America and all the way up to Alaska, and it's really, what's interesting about the way the author writes this is she tells about how the main character kind of gains all these friendships and everything that they go through, but when you get to the point where you start caring about the person, the character, all of a sudden the main character leaves and continues on her journey. But the author takes a page or two just sort of segue into this other person's life, the friend that she had made, and kind of tells us their fate and what happens to them. So I thought that was really interesting; you generally don't get to see this other person's character because the author usually considers them nonessential.
The romantic side of me, if that would be the right word, would always like to see the main character get what they're seeking or find exactly what they want, and that doesn't happen, so that can be potentially disheartening, but instead she finds this whole other life and she finds love in a different avenue.
I would give this book four stars out of five."
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