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Loading... Away: A Novel (edition 2007)by Amy Bloom
Work InformationAway by Amy Bloom
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I don't know who should get more credit-Amy Bloom or the excellent audio book reader, Barbara Rosenblatt, but it was a good reading experience, regardless. I kept imagining Bloom as a painter, making brush strokes that swept me back and forth through time. Flashing back a few years or flashing forward a few decades, she framed the story of Lillian Leyb with the stories and fates of the other characters. I didn't always admire Lillian, but I usually understood her motivations. In a weird way, it reminded me of The Color Purple-near relentless hardship and suffering, but not as a cheap plot device or there for the sole purpose of being "literary". Even so, the author was very close to taking it too far for me near the end, and if the book had ended differently, this might have been more of a rant than review, but she struck a balance right when it was needed. ( ) Away begs the question - as a mother, how far would you go to save your child? Lillian Leyb is a Russian widow, an orphan, and a mother who has lost her child to horrible violence during a Russian pogrom. As seemingly the only survivor of her family, she makes her way to America and it is in New York City where she tries to build a better life for herself as a seamstress in a theater company. When she hears that her four year old daughter might still be alive somewhere in Siberia, Lillian risks everything to get to her. She prostitutes her body, mind, and soul to get to Sophie. Lilian learns sex can be a weapon, a coping mechanism, but also her power and her comfort. It is one thing to say Lillian traveled to Siberia from New York, but it is quite another to see a map of her arduous journey from Manhattan to Chicago, to Fargo, to Spokane, to Vancouver and Dawson. The miles stretch out in an impossible-to-fathom line from one coast to the other. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
Moll Flanders in America, this epic, intimate novel follows a young Russian immigrant determined to make her way-and find her daughter-in the hip, harsh 1920s. On a morning in 1924, a young woman rises from the floor of her family's small home in Belorussia to find her parents and her husband slaughtered beside her and her infant daughter, Sophie, missing. When her aunt tells her the baby is dead, Lillian emigrates to America. She is working as a seamstress at the Yiddish Theater and enjoying cafe society when a cousin arrives and insists that her daughter is still alive-in Siberia. Lillian cannot stop dreaming of Sophie; she feels she must get to Russia, yet she can't afford the passage. Her only friend, an actor turned tailor, steals atlases from the New York Public Library and sews them into an overcoat for her. She crosses North America by rail, truck, and foot, encountering drifters, wardens, pimps, missionaries, and tattoo artists. From Dawson City, Alaska, she sets sail for Russia. She falls in love, falls in with the wrong people, leaps before she looks, hopes hard, and refuses to give up. Inspired by a true story, Away is Moll Flanders in America and Odysseus in the Jazz Age: big, wide, brilliantly imagined, unexpectedly funny, and unforgettable. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumAmy Bloom's book Away was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. HighBridge2 editions of this book were published by HighBridge. Editions: 1598875213, 1615730427 HighBridge AudioAn edition of this book was published by HighBridge Audio. |