Friday Focus: Weekend Reads

 

 

 It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by My Head is Full of Books, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
  

Today I'm featuring The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights by Kitty Zeldis. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover version borrowed from the library.

 

Book Beginning:  Chapter One

Catherine

Brooklyn, 1924

Catherine Berrill awoke to blood--again.

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Page 56: Catherine was glad they were taking a different street on their route home and didn't have to pass the dress shop again.

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My thoughts:  Bea and Alice leave a painful past in New Orleans to start a new life in Brooklyn. While focusing their energies on setting up a dress shop in Prospect Heights, they make the acquaintance of a local resident, Catherine Berrill, who visits the shop. As the story unfolds, decisions made by each of the women at crucial times unite and divide them in unexpected ways. Will each attain the fulfillment she longs for? Will their mutual relationship survive and deepen with time, or will they be forced apart by past and present circumstances? 

Told from different character perspectives, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights explores the lives of women who experience loss, heartbreak, disappointment, setback, and the constraints imposed by their gender. This is a captivating story of resilience that initiated a thoughtful discussion at a recent book club meeting.

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From Goodreads:  Mesmerizing historical novel about three women in 1920s New York City and the secrets they hold.

Brooklyn, 1924. As New York City enters the jazz age, the lives of three very different women are about to converge in unexpected ways. Recently arrived from New Orleans, Beatrice is working to establish a chic new dress shop with help from Alice, the orphaned teenage ward she brought north with her. Down the block, newlywed Catherine is restless in her elegant brownstone, longing for a baby she cannot conceive.

When Bea befriends Catherine and the two start to become close, Alice feels abandoned and envious, and runs away to Manhattan. Her departure sets into motion a series of events that will force each woman to confront the painful secrets of her past in order to move into the happier future she seeks.

Moving from the bustling streets of early twentieth century New York City to late nineteenth-century Russia and the lively quarters of New Orleans in the 1910s, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights is a story of the families we are born into and the families we choose, and of the unbreakable bonds between women.

 

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This Friday Focus: Weekend Reads post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for the blog, bookclublibrarian.com. It cannot be republished without attribution.