"At first glance two historical novels published last week have little in common. Where
Charles Bock’s second novel
Alice and Oliver
is a starkly realistic and unflinching portrait of a marriage undergoing trial by health crisis in 1990s New York,
Jennifer S. Brown’s debut novel
Modern Girls
, on the other hand, is a warm, heimisheh tale of two generations of women in a Jewish immigrant family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1930s whose opportunities and choices were limited by their gender." -- from
my examiner article. Also see my reviews of the two books in
New York Journal of Books
.