Good Reads

This is our Book Club book for November.  Sooooo good I read it in one day.  About a Chinese Woman and her daughter who emigrate from China to NYC.  The mother, a former classical violinist is forced to take a job in a clothing factory (aka sweatshop) owned by her older sister who financed their trip.  The daughter is the narrator who endures terrible living conditions and poverty and rises above them.  My friend Rita's father had to flee Austria and his upper class life during the Holocaust and endured similar deprivations upon reaching New York.  Man's inhumanity to man still shocks me.  God giving strength and hope to the disenfranchised does not.

Like me, the main character of this novel grew up reading biographies of heroic American women....Clara Barton, Molly Pitcher, but she followed her dream and became a nurse in an oncology ward.  When her brother comes down with cancer in his teens her desire to be a heroine in tested and bent but not broken.

I'd Know you Any Where by Laura Lippman....our October book Club selection is the story of a woman who was abducted by a serial killer at age of fifteen and lives her life keeping it a secret until the day her suburban life is shattered by a phone call from her abductor. 

 Nothing Daunted is the true story of two wealthy young ladies who decide to leave their privileged upbringing on the East Coast to teach children in the "wilds of Wyoming."
Being a school teacher  myself, it was amazing the obstacles these ladies undertook daily to teach in a location where a two hour horse ride through mountains of snow were required to get to their school each morning.  The community understood the value of their children being taught and made the school a primary focus in the wilderness where they lived.

Honolulu: a novel by Alan Brennert.
Tells the story of a picture bride that was brought to Honolulu from her impoverished home in China in 1914.I learned a lot about the history of Hawaii and the courage of these disenfranchised women.
I also read Maliki by Brennert which deals with the leprosy victims in Hawaii who were sequestered on that island for their lifetime.