This is a book club book that I had read half of but failed to finish reading in time about a year and a half ago, and I had forgotten so much of it that I just started over from the beginning. And I'm really glad I did!
The structure of the book is that it is told from the perspective of a ghost, who is following a pair of sisters at a Catholic orphanage during World War II. The narrative goes back and forth between telling the story of Frankie and her younger sister Toni, and piecing together the history of how the ghost died, and why she's there, and what she remembers. It tells the very real story of the aftermath of the Depression flowing into the war, while weaving through the stories of a number of women whose lives were, as always seems to be the case, controlled by and halted by men.
When I originally read the first half of it, I found some of the conceit of the book to be a bit hard to take, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if the payoffs in the second half of the book just made them easier to accept, but it bothered me less this time. I also was completely blindsided by a death I knew had to be coming; the way it was told just gutted me, and it's yet another book I've read during the pandemic that also captures the strange remove of living through major events that somehow seem distant from your own life, until they're not. All in all, a really nice read.
Grade: B
The structure of the book is that it is told from the perspective of a ghost, who is following a pair of sisters at a Catholic orphanage during World War II. The narrative goes back and forth between telling the story of Frankie and her younger sister Toni, and piecing together the history of how the ghost died, and why she's there, and what she remembers. It tells the very real story of the aftermath of the Depression flowing into the war, while weaving through the stories of a number of women whose lives were, as always seems to be the case, controlled by and halted by men.
When I originally read the first half of it, I found some of the conceit of the book to be a bit hard to take, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if the payoffs in the second half of the book just made them easier to accept, but it bothered me less this time. I also was completely blindsided by a death I knew had to be coming; the way it was told just gutted me, and it's yet another book I've read during the pandemic that also captures the strange remove of living through major events that somehow seem distant from your own life, until they're not. All in all, a really nice read.
Grade: B
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