Away — Review by Chris

Would you walk halfway around the world through untamed treacherous terrain and put yourself at the mercy of strangers, to find your child?

For Lillian, the lead character in Away, that was perhaps the easiest decision of her life. Her decisions — and the journeys on which they took her — are wonderfully and richly captured by author Amy Bloom, who chronicled Lillian's journey from Russia and back.

The rest of her existence she had known loss and sadness, want and pain. Lillian had scratched out a living with her family in Russia, married Osip and bore a child as was expected of her. That would have been her life — had her goyim neighbors not decided she and her family were evil. After a night filled with knives, broken china, axes and blood, she managed to send her daughter to the chicken coop to save her life.

It was the last time she would see Sophie alive.

In her mind-numbing grief, Lillian left her family farm and packed her meager belongings in a satchel. After weeks in steerage, listening to the tips of wiser and more worldly fellow passengers, she arrived on the busy streets of Lower Manhattan with only her talent as a seamstress and her cousin's address.

She does not stay in one place very long. At each step, she adapts, and she has willing and generous teachers along the way. Her cousin Frieda makes sure she realizes nothing in life is free, not even a spot as a night sleeper (and day seamstress) in the cramped apartment. Meyer takes her into his home and life, but to give him a veneer of respectability, and she learns companionship. From Reuben, she learns how to be a woman of refinement, to pronounce the Ws and to speak and understand English. Yaakov, whose life ended and began with the death of his wife and child, brought her the love of the thesaurus and a path to Siberia.

Even so, word of Sophie's life came from an unreliable source: an opportunistic cousin who wanted her life. Why would Lillian take the word of someone who told her the impossible while placing her hand on the small of her back and shoving her out the door?

But a mother who wishes for the impossible may not feel the pressure on her back. She may not listen to saner heads who wonder aloud whether Sophie would live best with a grief-stricken mother whose dreams are troubled and dangerous. Other minds might wonder if Sophie would remember this woman years afterward, whether Lillian's love is enough to tear her away from her new family, the only family she might remember. But other minds, saner minds are not Lillian's, and in the end they can only advise and assist. Through it all, she lost a lot and gained little, helped others and was helped, loved and was loved in return.

The story is rich in detail. From Bloom's descriptions, readers can visualize Meyer's love nest, Frieda's tiny and greasy apartment, the absolutely dark closet in which she crossed part of the American continent and the second broom closet in which she crossed the rest. Readers wince at her infected blisters, her tattoo, her lice.

The only disconnect I found in the story was when Bloom introduced us to two other characters in the story, giving them the same weight and importance as Lillian. At least one did not warrant that attention, and it felt a little gratuitious, as though Bloom did not want to waste the research or she wanted to make a point. It is minor.

However, this minor point does not take away from the beauty of the book. It's more than a travelogue. It's an epic story of survival that challenges us to wonder if we would risk it all and literally walk toward one life while walking away from another.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman—Review by Carole

I appreciate Nora Ephron’s sense of humor. Although my exposure to it has been limited, until now, to the movies she writes, such as When Harry Met Sally or Sleepless in Seattle, she has a sensibility that I find charming.

In her book, she comments on what aging has been like for her and I think she brings to mind what all women go through to some extent or another.

While I disagree with her politics and her views on marriage, her observations on aging were wryly amusing. My sisters-in-law and I discussed this as our book club book in September. Everyone enjoyed reading it, and we had a great time chatting about it.

They laughed at me because I had employed my sticky note method. Do you know this one? You get the skinny strips of Post Its, which come in lots of fun colors, and you tab the pages and write your comments on them. For this book, I picked a sunny yellow color to match the book’s cover. Geeky? Sure. But fun? You bet!

Invaluable for book club chats—it sure beats spending what precious time you have to talk about a book thumbing through the book, mumbling, “I really like the part where she says something funny about something…wait, I’ll find it.” Only you can never find it when you want to, by the time you do, the conversation has moved on. I think my book tabs keep the conversation going, and we’ve been able to get more in depth with our chats because we can talk about specifics.

This tab method works especially well with a book that is essentially a chat between the writer and the reader. It’s like I’m contributing to her conversation. Ephron mentions how, early in her married life (her first marriage), she became imaginary friends with all of the great chefs of the day as she tackled one cooking endeavor after another. I could relate as I have been known to daydream about chatting with chefs who tell me that my touch of tarragon really did improve their recipe. I read a quote by her that reveals all you need to know on this topic, “Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.”

Ephron observed trends that I have spoken about at length to girlfriends—one in particular, the sprouting of nail salons in every strip shopping center in America, seemingly overnight. This usually comes up in conversation as we are sitting in one such salon getting our mani/pedis. A few short years ago they didn’t exist, and now we can’t seem to do without them. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not, but I do love how my French pedicure looks with sandals! Chris has blogged about this herself. We all seem to be conflicted by something that is purely unnecessary in our daily lives, yet so wonderful we don’t want to be without it.

In the book, Ephron also waxes philosophic about waxing and many other beauty regimen essentials. Should you have plastic surgery? What kind? Do you get injections? What kind? From her first assertion that the neck starts to go at 43 (uh oh!), I was fascinated. It’s like reading the exploits of someone who has traveled to a destination you are contemplating. I figure—Ephron has negotiated a few twists and turns on the aging road that I haven’t encountered yet, so if she can provide me a bit of a roadmap, it would be folly for me not to study it a bit.

A quick read of an afternoon, maybe longer if you take the time to use sticky notes, I Feel Bad About My Neck offers some humorous as well as touching insights into what aging is like for women today. It would be a great gift for a girlfriend turning a significant birthday, much better than a gag gift of prunes and Geritol. (Does any woman find that funny, ever? Seriously?)