Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York is for anyone who has visited a city they used to love and found it changed beyond recognition, or even visited a city for the first time and found a succession of familiar storefronts where once a range of independent shops proliferated. The trend isn't new, but it's been on my mind since an article about a beloved grocery store closing in Le Marais, only for the space to reopen as a high-end lingerie store. Jeremiah Moss feels the pain of the Parisians bemoaning this turn of events.

Vanishing New York is a work to evoke sadness and anger in those who don't want to inhabit a cookie cutter world. Moss takes a deep dive into gentrification, public policy (especially the "tax breaks" that politicians like to hand out like candy), and corporate greed, while also laying a share of blame at those who want to play tourist - or up sticks and move somewhere new altogether - all while being able to eat and shop in the same places they know at home. In short, it's a depressing read laying bare a knot of problems, none of which has easy solutions. (It's all good and fine to exhort everyone to eat/shop local, but as Moss points out, in many cases corporations are going to great lengths to appear local, especially to those who aren't in the know.)

Moss devotes the most ink to the changes in Manhattan, from the Lower East Side to Greenwich Village to Harlem, and then dives into Brookyln before quickly looking at Queens and the Bronx. Staten Island doesn't merit a mention. Whether this is because the same forces aren't impacting it, or aren't impacting it yet, or Moss simply doesn't like it, I couldn't say, but my only quibble what that unexplained omission.

A well-written and depressing read. Five stars.

A Death of No Importance

It's 1910 and Jane Prescott is an accomplished lady's maid whose service to one of New York's most influential matrons positions her for service to the new-money Benchley family upon the stately Mrs. Armslow's death. Compared to Mrs. Armslow - related by birth or marriage to the finest families of the city - the Benchley's are quite the comedown.

They value Jane for her understanding of high society, an understanding they do not yet possess and which becomes all the more necessary (and apparent) when the youngest Benchley daughter, Charlotte, causes outrage and scandal by becoming engaged to Norrie Newsome, scion of the mining family. The Newsomes, while one of the "finest families" are also beset by their own scandals, from the mining disaster that killed so many children in Pennsylvania to Mr. Newsome's remarriage to his daughter's schoolmate. All of which is to say: there's plenty to unravel when Norrie is viciously murdered at his family's Christmas party, just as his engagement to Charlotte Benchley was to become official.

As Jane learns more of the murder, she discovers that she alone may be able to solve it.

Author Mariah Fredericks mystery is well-written and captivating. From the inclusion of anarchists to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, she's included significant historical events that make this more than a simple, puff piece, and increased my interest. I also appreciated the twists; just when I thought I knew what would happen (and I'm not speaking only of the murder mystery here), she added plot twists to keep the reader on her toes and decrease the predictability and formulaic turns that such mysteries can often take.

Four stars.

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

97 Orchard simultaneously provides insight into the immigrant experience, eating habits and the evolution of American cuisine (particularly the ways in which ethnic foods first began to influence it), and life in New York circa 1900. Each of these topics could be its own volume, and in the case of, say The Long Way Home or The Food of a Younger Land, this premise has been proven. Yet Jane Ziegelman tackles the challenge deftly, incorporating these aspects like ingredients into a finely mixed dough.

In crafting her narrative, Ziegelman examines the lives and cuisines of five families who lived in the tenement apartments at 97 Orchard Street. First came the German Glockners, with their sauerkraut and heavy stews. The Glockners are an ideal starting point because Mr. Glockner actually built and owned the building and were the first to inhabit their apartment, moving into 97 Orchard Street in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. (Mr. Glockner's draft card, Ziegelman informs her reader, indicated he was a tailor.) The Glockners were followed by the Irish Moores, whose ethnic foods included little more than the potatoes that had failed them at home and oatcakes. The Irish immigration was largely comprised of teenagers, we learn, and following the brutal policies of the English, the ancient and rich food traditions of the Emerald Isle had been whittled down to potatoes. The Irish was generally happy to adopt and adapt the foods of their new land.

Due to their strict food laws, the Jewish immigrants were much less malleable, and Ziegelman then looks at how the Gumpertz family - German Jews - and the Rogarshevsky family, from Lithuania, lived and ate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Matzoh, kugel, knish, and carp featured heavily, although immigrants of all religions consumed significant amounts of cabbage, potatoes, and root vegetables. I was personally taken with the history of Jewish poultry farming inside the tenements themselves. While the language of the day was not, well, sensitive, I could certainly understand the horror of the journalists, social workers, and reformers who encountered the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied this practice.

Last but not least, Ziegelman introduces the Baldizzis, Sicilians who immigrated illegally (he as a stowaway, she on a doctored passport) in the early-1920s. The Italians, Ziegelman notes, understood better than any other group that they were not wanted in America, and that they were here to do the hard and dirty jobs (digging subway tunnels, erecting skycrapers, building roads) that the natives did not want. Sound familiar? They bore their lot stoically - In questa vita si fa uva - but their food was their comfort, and the Italians were the least interested in adopting or adapting the foods of the new country. Italian grocers imported pastas, tomato sauces, and olive oils that not only tasted like home, but came from home. Americans were suspicious. Pretty much no one in 1925 would have believed that spaghetti and meatballs would one day be as quintessentially American as apple pie. (Pie, I learned, is pretty much the one truly American dish. Americans were known almost universally as "pie eaters" to wave after wave of immigrants.)

Through the decades, Ziegelman describes the evolution of the city's geographical and political landscape evolves, the food, and the perception of various immigrant groups (German in 1900 = model immigrant; German in 1914 = terror of the Hun). I enjoyed the tour, if you will immensely.

Five stars.

Summer at Tiffany

Summer at Tiffany is Marjorie Hart's delightful, fast, fun, nostalgic memoir of the summer of 1945, when she and her best friend, Marty Garrett, traveled to New York City for the summer and became the first women to ever work at Tiffany's. (Yes, as in, little blue box baubles.) Not only did she and Marty make history becoming the first women ever hired at the iconic flagship, but they also had a front row seat the V-E Day and V-J Day celebrations that punctuated the beginning and end of the summer. In between, they flirted with sailors, rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, worried over news from the Pacific, and experienced the joys and perils of life in the big city, a day at the ocean, and so much more.

The idea to spend the summer in New York came from some of Marjorie and Marty's Kappa sisters at the University of Iowa. Convinced it would be easy to find jobs as shop girls in the best department stores, Marjorie and Marty take the train east, only to be turned away from a succession of top stores. Through a combination of grit, pluck, luck, and a fortuitous reference through a previously-unknown family connection, they land jobs as pages where everyone from Judy Garland to the Windsors to the top mafiosos shop.

Remarkable as the stories about Tiffany are, it's the overriding sense of an era, the zeitgesit, that sets this memoir apart. The little details - about fashion, news reports, food, curfews, college songs, and attending church - are in many ways the heart of the book. I tore through this in a couple of nights, and it left me wanting more. It also left me a bit awed by Hart herself, who the internet tells me is 95 and still going strong. She's even on Twitter, which is more than I can say.

Five stars, for the book, and the author.

The Secret Life of Violet Grant

A friend shared The Secret Life of Violet Grant with me as her summer reading recommendation; happily, it had been on my list long enough that my turn on the library's waitlist came up just a week later. And what a great recommendation - I loved, loved, loved every page of this book, which is especially notable since I'm often ambivalent at best about dual-narrative fiction. So.

Narrative 1: It's 1964 and Vivian Schuyler, recent college graduate and aspiring writer (but current lackey) at New York's "Metropolitan" magazine receives a package, which turns out to be a suitcase addressed to Violet Grant, a great-aunt whose existence was heretofore unknown to Vivian. What's more the suitcase once belonged to Violet, who was last heard from 50 years earlier in pre-(first) world war Europe. Curiosity sparked, Vivian determines to unravel the mystery of who Violet Grant was and why her suitcase has re-appeared in New York.

Narrative 2: It's 1912-14 and Violet Schuyler Grant has defied all expectations for her class and gender by moving to England to pursue scientific studies at Oxford. Seduced by a fellow scientist, they marry and move to Berlin, where they have front-row seats to preparations for war. As the continent heads for calamity, Violet is drawn further into the orbit of a mysterious British army officer who formerly studied with her husband.

Beatriz Williams has written both of these narratives beautifully, and each is so complete that it could have comprised a lovely little read on its own. She has also carefully crafted the intersection of the two stories so that in the end The Secret Life of Violet Grant comes together perfectly. Williams gets bonus points for her epilogue, with an unexpected twist, which is always the most welcome kind.

Five stars.

Homer and Langley

On the surface this would seem like a depressing book. Homer and Langley Collyer were actual people - brothers, scions of an old-money family - living in a Fifth Avenue manse, two men on their own, consumed by blindness (Homer) and madness (Langley), eventually cut off from the world and unable to move about in cold, dark pile that would literally become their tomb. Yet, E.L. Doctorow's writing is so engaging, his touch so light, that Homer and Langley actually feels snappy and light.

The novel is told entirely from the perspective of Homer, who, though blind, witnesses his brother's departure for the first world war, his return after being gassed, and his total descent into madness, reclusivity, hoarding, and paranoia. Through Homer the reader learns of the years of newspapers, the Model T, the bits and bobs of Army surplus, and the jazz musicians, gangsters, and hippies who all come to reside, some permanently and some as transients inside the stately mansion. The writing is poignant, yet humorous, pithy, but wise, and above all it is human. Doctorow has deftly captured their lives and experiences in ways that feel authentic and kind.

This is an original work, in every sense of the word, and one that should appeal to a wide array of readers.

Five stars.

Summer of '49

The cover says this is "the story of a magnificent season - and the battle royal between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the heart of a nation." Halberstam captures much more than a baseball season between the covers, though. He captures an entire zeitgeist and draws the reader back to the age of players who had fought in an actual war. He also brings to life each of the players, so that they are not merely the athletes of the era, but varied and interesting human beings. This is perhaps best illustrated when Halberstam relays the anecdote of the notoriously intelligent and well-spoken Dom DiMaggio, little brother of Joe, shouting at an umpire, "I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life!"

Unlike Halberstam's The Fifties, Summer of '49 is brisk and lively. There can be no doubt that his passion fueled this work. In that way, it is similar to The Boys of Summer, the major events of which took place just three or four years after the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out. I am not a particular fan of baseball (I'd barely seen more than two games before meeting my husband in college), but I've now read several books that track the progression of baseball from the very early days (Saint Louis, 1883) to the height of the Ruth-Gehrig mania (New York, 1927), to the post-war evolution of the game from radio and day games to television and night games. Summer of '49 just might be the best of them, though.

Five stars.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk was a recent airport bookstore find. I was sold on the idea of a little old lady, a retired ad exec from the days when women simply didn't work, reminiscing about her life as she walked through miles of New York City on New Year's Eve 1984. Ultimately, I found the premise more enticing than the execution; or, perhaps I found Lillian slightly lacking, at least in comparison to other geriatric protagonists (take a bow, Ove and Hendrik).

Kathleen Rooney is a fine writer, and she does a lovely job placing Lillian in mid-80s New York - grit, crime, AIDS, the soaring Twin Towers - it's all there for the reader's pleasure. I just found Lillian a bit too...abrasive? Sure of herself? Odd? I'll let you determine whether and how her character is deficient (also: it could just be me), but I had a hard time caring about either her past, or the events unfolding before her on NYE. Correction: I didn't care. The book was short, the writing was snappy, the flight was long, and in the end I was determined to finish. My life is no better for the decision, though.

Two stars (one each for good writing and entrancing cityscapes).

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

Reading a book like this fills me with awe for the feats of engineering and and, frankly, back-breaking labor, that occurred regularly and as a matter of course for much of this country's history. Such mammoth undertakings are the stuff of David McCullough - from the Panama Canal, which, yes, I know, is not in this country, but was very much constructed at the will of it; to bridges and dams; to the Wright brothers' first flying machines. (Side note: it's no wonder McCullough is the master here - his latest book was published this past spring; Great Bridge in 1972.) There is no one better at bringing the greatest examples of innovation, invention, and engineering down to size than McCullough. 

That said, the primary weakness of The Great Bridge is, perhaps, McCullough's own strength: he has such a grasp of the engineering principles that he cannot help but include every last detail on how the caissons bore into the earth, how the cables were spun, how the planks were laid. Sometimes I felt I was reading an engineering text, rather than an historical account of the construction. I plead guilt to some serious skimming of these sections.

I was much more interested in the life and times of the Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling, the (exceedingly corrupt) political environments in Tammany Hall and the Grant administration, Henry Beecher's hypocrisy, the inimitable Emily Roebling, and the medical advances of the age...pretty much everything but the tensile strength of Bessamer vs. crucible steel. I had to chuckle when I read, "Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge..." Like Collingwood's audience, I felt McCullough belabored these points a little too much.

Evidently I've lodged this complaint before as, in reviewing my previous McCullough posts, I noted my final verdict on the Paris book, "Overall, this was a good read, although it could be quite dense at time and, therefore, a bit of a slow go. French history or American art history buffs would enjoy it greatly, but others might find it just a bit on the dull side." Likewise, those with a strong interest in our nation's public works might go ga-ga for McCullough's detailed work, but other readers might find parts of it a slow go.

The Boys of Summer

As the cover states, The Boys of Summer is "the classical narrative of growing up within shouting distance of Ebbets Field, covering the Dodgers in the Jackie Robinson years...and what's happened to everyone since." While not false, I would say that the emphasis is strongly on the "covering the Dodgers" and "what's happened," with less focus on the growing up in Brooklyn bit. In other words, this is more Mike Royko meets The Summer of Beer and Whiskey than it is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Roger Kahn grew up in Brooklyn, in the shadow of Ebbets Field, the son of a man who loved the Dodgers almost more than he loved his family. Roger never had a chance of being anything other than a Dodgers fan. Through luck, happenstance, and hard work, he became the Dodgers beat reporter at the tender age of 24, at which point he hopscotched the country with the likes of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in 1952 and 1953. Traveling with an integrated ball club through the Jim Crow South, he learned more than he expected before leaving the assignment after two seasons. These experience comprise the first half of the book.

The second half is the "what's happened" bit, where Kahn criss-crosses the country again, this time by himself, as he visits the former players who have scattered from Connecticut to LA to Middle America. Their stories are fascinating for what they show us about how former athletes used to retire versus how they retire today. Carl Furillo has a job installing elevators in the World Trade Center. Billy Cox is tending bar at an American Legion. A few have gone into business, but none seems to have achieved over-the-top success. Only Gil Hodges is still in baseball. The modesty with which they are living out their lives - and for the most part these are still relatively young men - speaks volumes about how the country and professional sports have changed.

I liked this book. At times Kahn was a little too technical (or, honestly long-winded) in describing specific plays or games, but on the whole this is a book that a layman can read without getting bogged down. I especially enjoyed the passages that focused on journalism in the 1950s - the nuts and bolts of the newsroom and the culture, in particular.

In 1997, Kahn added an afterward where he writes about how the book was originally received in 1972. "Yardley complained, not entirely pleasantly, that I had written two books, not one." When I read that, I thought, "bingo!" The two haves are well-written, certainly, and each is interesting in its own way, but they really do feel like two different books. Unlike Yardley, I'm not convinced this is a complaint, but it was unexpected.

Final verdict: Baseball fans will undoubtedly relish Kahn's work. Non-fans may want to consider what other titles comprise their current reading list and prioritize accordingly.

The Swans of Fifth Avenue

I have read and enjoyed so many of Melanie Benjamin’s books now that I never doubted I would read – and like – The Swans of Fifth Avenue. What was different about this book from her previous works, at least for me, is that I was previously unfamiliar with Babe Paley (as opposed to the Lindberghs, for example), and remained completely disinterested in her (unlike Mrs. Tom Thumb, for instance).

Swans is Benjamin’s recreation of Truman Capote’s friendship with – and ultimately betrayal of – Bill and Babe Paley circa mid-nineteenth century. I found Bill Paley, founder and chairman of CBS, to be the most interesting character. Benjamin’s portrayal of Capote made me dislike him immensely. I should add that what I knew about Capote previously can be summed up by the following: from Alabama, related to Harper Lee, author of In Cold Blood, gay. Certainly Benjamin colors in this portrait more completely; I just didn’t care for him.

The most wonderful attribute of the book is Benjamin’s writing. Her language is beautiful, her sentences well designed, her paragraphs a delight to read. It is rare that I have the pleasure of reading such marvelously crafted words from the opening page to the closing one. Although I can’t recommend Swans as heartily as either Alice I Have Been or The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, it is a very good read and the hesitation on my part stems entirely from my previously mentioned disinterest in the characters rather than Benjamin’s work.

The Murder of the Century The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

Paul Collins's Murder of the Century offers readers a glimpse into big city crime when fingerprints were considered unreliable, DNA testing did not exist, cops and coroners were in somebody's pocket, and journalists were as likely to solve a murder as law enforcement.

So what is the so-called murder of the century? Amid a broiling mid-summer heat wave in 1897, body parts begin turning up across New York City - a torso in the East River, limbs in Harlem, that kind of thing. But whose are they? And where is the head? And, most importantly, who is responsible? While one cop works doggedly to answer these questions, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer use the crime as an opportunity to turn up the heat in their tabloid war with one another.

The Murder of the Century is as much a tale of yellow journalism as it is of murder. In many ways, I was reminded of the murder which captivated London just a few years later, that committed by Hawley Harvey Crippen and detailed by Erik Larson in Thunderstruck. Collins does a good job with both the journalism and the murder, but I couldn't help feeling that there just wasn't quite enough material here for a full book. As a result, the book alternates between being highly readable and completely bogged down in details that feel extraneous to the story he's telling.

Two-point-five stars.

Saint Mazie

Mazie Phillips - orphan, lush, unlucky in love, successful businesswoman, humanitarian, possible saint - chronicles the life and times of the Lower East Side circa 1910-1935 in the pages of her treasured diary. She records what she sees and what she feels, how the city around her changes, and how those around her are changed by it. Her world is peopled with cops and nuns, bums and working stiffs, criminals and the mentally ill. Through the pages of her diary, which has been lost and now found some 90 years later, the reader comes to know Mazie in all her glory.

I discovered Jami Attenberg's Saint Mazie in the BBC's, Ten Books to Read in June. From the article's description, "Attenberg brings [Mazie] to life primarily through her fictional diaries...she also weaves in sections from her unpublished autobiography and fictitious oral history accounts from people who knew her," I expected Saint Mazie to be a bit like Lovers at the Chameleon Club. In that sense, I was disappointed.

The various pieces do not fit together nearly as well as they do in Francine Prose's magnificent novel. I had a hard time separating the contemporary voices. Elio Ferrante, Philip Tekverk, Pete Sorensen, and Vera Sung, are a handful of the people who give accounts to the "author" of Mazie's life. Yet they run together and mostly seemed unnecessary. In contrast, George Flicker and Lydia Wallach's accounts help move the story forward.

What Attenberg does do very, very well is to bring a place to life. The pages of Saint Mazie pulse with the life of a New York that does not exist anymore: tenements, speakeasies, immigrants, in short, the entire Lower East Side existence. It is the most place-driven book I have read in a long time; what happens here could not have happened anywhere else. In many ways, this book reminded me of a cross between the hopefulness of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the desperation of My Notorious Life.

Although it starts rather slowly, Saint Mazie slowly yet surely sank its hook into me and, once I was hooked, I had to know what happened next and next and next. Attenberg's characters defy easy categorization; in the end it is difficult to want anything but that elusive ephemeral thing called happiness for each of them.

Lovers of historical fiction, place-based literature, and the American experience should especially enjoy this novel.

The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

As much about the immigrant experience circa 1910 as it is about World War I, David Laskin's The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War offers a unique perspective - or perspectives - on World War I.

Laskin has painstakingly reconstructed the histories of a dozen young, fresh immigrants to the United States, all of whom - by choice or by chance - return to the "Old Country" as soldiers in their adopted country's army to face the horrors of World War I. The men come from Italy and Ireland, Poland and the Pale of Settlement, and from places that have long ceased to exist (Kaszubia, anyone?). They are driven to the U.S. for all the usual reasons, of course, which generally amounts to seeking an escape from bone crushing poverty. Their experiences here are different - from mining in Montana, gardening in Massachusetts, and of course eking out a living on the Lower East Side (population density 1,000 per square block).

Their roles in war vary as well. Sam Goldberg patrolled the desert southwest as part of the cavalry in the aftermath of the Zimmerman Telegram. Most go to Europe, though, where they are deployed along the Western Front to break a four-year-old stalemate. Here Laskin delves into the politics of fighting war: arranging troops, ordering advances, coordinating positions among men who do not speak the same language. All of this, of course, at a time when messages traveled no faster than a good horse and the messenger might be shot en route. (As a sidenote, I remain fascinated by the fact that the All American Division was comprised of men who spoke 43 languages, but frequently almost no English.)

In Europe some men barely see war, but others become heroes. Michael Valente received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions. And some do not come home.

In many ways, given the U.S.'s late entry into the war, The Long Way Home is a bookend to The Guns of August (still one of the finest World War I histories I've read). It is fast paced and, honestly, fascinating, offering insights on the immigrant's experience as well as the soldier's. All told, The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War is an excellent read.

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

As a general rule, I tend to read much more non-fiction than novels, but I've been on a roll with fiction this summer and Susan Jane Gilman's The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street definitely falls in the category of great fiction. (Villa Triste and Elizabeth Is Missing are the other wonderful novels I've read recently.)

Five-year-old Malka Treynovsky arrives in New York in 1913, one of the huddled Eastern European Jewish masses yearning to breathe free. Her family wasn't even supposed to come to America, but now that they're here, Malka is determined to find her happy ending. Three months later she's crippled in an accident with an Italian ices peddler and abandoned. Taken in by the peddler's family, Malka becomes Lillian and forges a new identity and life for herself.

Lillian marries the handsome but illiterate Albert Dunkle, and the two of them build an empire of ice cream shops starting with a single truck. Soon, Lillian is the head of an ice cream empire and a celebrity in her own right, which is wonderful for her right up until it isn't: when she finds herself on trial for both tax evasion and assault. In the midst of this double ordeal, Lillian has decided to share her ordeal with us, darlings, and her voice is what makes Ice Cream Queen the masterpiece that it is. Part Jewish immigrant, part Italian immigrant, and with more than a touch of megalomania, Lillian's gravelly, no-nonsense voice is still ringing in my ears.

My Notorious Life

I must confess: I read closely for 300 pages, then skimmed about 100 before reading the last 30-40 closely again. I don't feel like I missed anything. I liked Kate Manning's My Notorious Life, but it was simply too long. More than once I had to flip back through hundreds of pages to refresh myself on some person or event - and it's not like it took me six months to read!

My Notorious Life opens with a suicide - whose and for what reasons will not be revealed until the closing pages of this drama. In between, we are treated to the life and times of Axie Muldoon aka Mrs. Ann Jones aka Madame DeBeausacq aka Madame X. Axie-Ann-Madame is the orphan daughter of Irish immigrants. The defining events of her early life are riding the orphan train west from New York City to Rockford, Illinois, where she alone among her siblings is not adopted, and watching her mother die in childbirth. Both will mark her, of course, and set her on the path to becoming Madame X, the city's most sought midwife who delivers her patients safely of their babies, though often "prematurely."

Madame is on a collision course with Anthony Comstock, he of the famous Comstock laws, though and it is this battle that leads to the events of the opening pages - and the closing ones.

Written in the style of a memoir, Manning does a nice job of capturing the voice of a poor immigrant girl in nineteenth century. The language is pitch-perfect, non only Axie-Ann-Madame's, but especially that of her German friend, Greta, whose own history is so intertwined with that of the protagonist.

Returning to my opening comments, the (undue) length is the only knock I have against My Notorious Life. Certainly there were times I wanted to reach through the pages and shake one or more of the characters, but that is the hallmark of good writing. The twists and turns are mostly unpredictable, the language rich, and the work of the midwife deftly handled.