Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t imagine – a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her « How did you get to be the woman you are today? » She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.
I started this book almost by mistake, thinking that I probably wouldn’t like it. After twenty pages at most, I was so deeply engrossed in the story that I couldn’t stop reading it, and finished during the night. This story is well-written and interesting, and while mixing sadder and lighter parts (just like in any real life, after all), it never lacked rhythm.
Also, bonus point for being the very first book I read on an ereader. Yay for Christmas!