A review by martydah
Away by Amy Bloom
2.0
This is one of those books I really wish I liked better. Bloom is a good writer and storyteller. I just didn't care for most of the story. It had a good premise: Lillian Leyb leaves Russia for America in the 1920s, thinking that her little daughter Sophie died in the same pogrom that killed the rest of her family. Lillian, as her father used to say, is lucky - no matter what ugly or sordid situation she has to confront, she always comes through it in the end.
Lillian starts out as a seamstress, then mistress of a famous theater owner and his closeted son. A cousin from the old world appears, with news that Sophie is in fact alive and has been adopted by Lillian's childless neighbors. Lillian leaves her materially comfortable but morally questionable situation to travel across the country to Alaska, where she hopes to cross the Bering Sea into Siberia and find Sophie. Along the way she is thrown in with a myriad of characters, an African-American prostitute with a good heart, a young Chinese girl who is a master grifter, and a well-meaning policeman who has her put in a woman's prison to keep her, he thinks, from dying in the harsh Alaskan winter. The book provides an ending, not only for Lillian's and Sophie's stories, but for all of the characters that they come to know in the novel.
I liked Lillian as a character. It was just hard to buy into most of her adventures, or to really think that some of the incidents were necessary to the story. It seemed to be a little too much of a good thing. The story of traveling clear across the United States really should have been enough. Since I do like Bloom as a writer, I'm interested and reading some of her other books, to make a comparison with this one.
Lillian starts out as a seamstress, then mistress of a famous theater owner and his closeted son. A cousin from the old world appears, with news that Sophie is in fact alive and has been adopted by Lillian's childless neighbors. Lillian leaves her materially comfortable but morally questionable situation to travel across the country to Alaska, where she hopes to cross the Bering Sea into Siberia and find Sophie. Along the way she is thrown in with a myriad of characters, an African-American prostitute with a good heart, a young Chinese girl who is a master grifter, and a well-meaning policeman who has her put in a woman's prison to keep her, he thinks, from dying in the harsh Alaskan winter. The book provides an ending, not only for Lillian's and Sophie's stories, but for all of the characters that they come to know in the novel.
I liked Lillian as a character. It was just hard to buy into most of her adventures, or to really think that some of the incidents were necessary to the story. It seemed to be a little too much of a good thing. The story of traveling clear across the United States really should have been enough. Since I do like Bloom as a writer, I'm interested and reading some of her other books, to make a comparison with this one.