Check Out An Elegant Woman Fashioned By Martha McPhee Offered In Book

took me a goodor more pages to get into this book, I had a hard time really enjoying a book about the lies these two women tell to make themselves feel important and to get ahead in life.
Once I got further, and it became about the family in general, not just the first two generations, I liked it better.
.so many lush stories within stories, every family has them, this one more than most, perhaps, if you ever loved laura ingalls wilder books about homesteading and single room schoolhouses from a child's view, this book starts in montana with just that but from an entirely different child's view and it's a good one.
you cannot help but fall in sync with young thelma/tommy and admire her 'gumption', be fascinated by her mother, her desire to take care of her beautiful younger sister and all that befalls and yes, they make of themselves.
And indeed they do create themselves in this book of personal reinvention across generations,
I don't know whether some of the wondrous characters and interwoven narratives come from the author's own family archives or perhaps some people she 'knows', but the key protagonists' voices tommy/thelma/kat glenna rings with authenticity and desire.

I also loved the subtext about how family narratives indeed all narratives are embellished and made more 'elegant' or 'interesting' or whatever characteristics become embedded in stories.
In this book, there is a wonderful dissection in the form of a modern American road trip of one of these family stories involving a dry dusty town, an undertaker, a weathered sign and some weather.
Love! I really wanted to like this book, I love historical fiction and I find family sagas particularly interesting, The book started out with promise, four sisters cleaning out their grandmother's house after her passing and find a lot of interesting things in her attic.
My problem was that the story jumps around in time, a lot of information didn't really seem to enhance the narrative.
The story seems to center on Grammy or also known as Thelma, Tommy or Katherine, I just couldn't follow all the characters and the flow of the story, AtI realized I was skimming and trying to find something I felt was relevant, Maybe in another time I would love this book but now isn't the time,

Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for providing me with a copy of this book, For fans of Mary Beth Keane and Jennifer Egan, this powerful, moving multigenerational saga from National Book Award finalist Martha McPheeten years in the makingexplores one familys story against the sweep ofth century American history.


Drawn from the authors own family history, An Elegant Woman is a story of discovery and reinvention, following four generations of women in one American family.
As Isadora, a novelist, and two of her sisters sift through the artifacts of their forebears lives, trying to decide what to salvage and what to toss, the narrative shifts to a winter day inat a train station in Ohio.
Two girls wait in the winter cold with their motherthe mercurial Glenna Stewartto depart for a new life in the West.
As Glenna campaigns in Montana for womens suffrage and teaches in oneroom schoolhouses, Tommy takes care of her little sister, Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while Katherine goes to school.
When Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives,

A profound meditation on memory, history, and legacy, An Elegant Woman follows one woman over the course of theth century, taking the reader from a droughtstricken farm in Montana to a yellow Victorian in Maine from the halls of a psychiatric hospital in London to a wedding gown fitting at Bergdorf Goodman from a house in small town Ohio to a family reunion at a sweltering New Jersey pig roast.
Framed by Isadoras efforts to retell her grandmothers journeyand understand her ownthe novel is an evocative exploration of the stories we tell ourselves, and what we leave out.
.The year isand Montana is calling for workers, new opportunities to those who take up the challenge.
Glenna, leaves her husband and takes her two young daughters, to the new land where she is sure they will thrive.
Glenna does, but it is soon apparent her job prospects are better, sans her children, Leaving them with a farming family, who comes to live them, a love that is returned, she shows up a few years later.
Taking them away, they are now pretty much left on their own, The eldest Teddy, providing for her younger sister,

This is a generational novel, but for me the middle lagged, Teddy's story went on too long.
What this novel does well though us show how the past reflects in the girls future, Past traumas that are very much in evidence in the decisions they make, How these decisions reflect in how they raised and the expectations they had, for their own children, How sometimes pretending something is will make it so, with hard work and the formidable will to move forward.


This did good my interest, but in some spots more than others, There were even a few surprises along the way, I just think it's length bogged this down, too detailed, could have been a little more succinct,

ARC from Edelweiss,.rounded up

Since there isn't as much press for this one, I want to provide a short summary for those reading this review.
Isadora a novelist and two of her sisters are going through their grandmother's belongings as she has passed away and it is their job to review what can be sold or thrown out.
You know the deal, that person in your family that saves absolutely everything Well, that's this scenario, What a nightmare, right Well, what makes this story so special is that the granddaughters actually know some of the history behind the objects in this house because their grandmother Katherine aka Thelma, Tommy more on this later, made it a point to repeatedly tell her children and their children the stories of their family dating all the way back to Mary Queen of Scots up through the Civil War.


Isadora is the granddaughter who was closest to Katherine so while her sisters look at most everything as junk and something to get rid of or sell, she treasures the history in the belongings and wants to write a story on her grandmother.
It is from Isadora's point of view that we learn about their grandmother's life, Beginning in the winter of, at a train station where Katherine's mother, Glenna, is taking her and her younger sister out West to Montana to start a new life because Glenna is leaving their father in the dead of night due to his philandering.


The characters in this book are WOW, They are fully developed characters who are powerful, flawed, headstrong and human, There is something in here for everyone, Though Glenna is extremely unlikeable, there is something to be said about how she lived her life and the courage it took to move around the state of Montana and Nevada with the gusto she had.
I most enjoyed the dynamic between the sisters, Thelma who went by Tommy and later became Katherine, and Katherine.
I could write a dissertation on their relationship, but I won't because this review already is too long.
There is a lot to dislike about both sisters, but I think that's one of the other themes of this book the humanity we all share as flawed beings.
We all make mistakes and all do the best we can in the environment we are raised, The decision that Thelma makes sets both sisters on a course that will reverberate through the generations,

The largest theme discussed in the book, which caused me to ponder about my own family history, which I unfortunately know very little about, is that what the younger generations know is all based on the stories we are told from our ancestors.
If there is no written record or if that record is difficult to obtain, we can only rely on word of mouth.
With this, falsehoods can be inserted and once those falsehoods are accepted as truth, events can be altered.
These tiny alterations play a big part in the history of this family and was an interesting perspective that I hadn't considered before.


If you hadn't guessed already this was a freaking fantastic read, I haven't read historical fiction in a long time on a genre hiatus, but this reminded me why I love reading about the past.
Nostalgia is a powerful force and the history nerd in me was geeking out entirely while reading this meticulously researched book that spanned fromto present times and followed each generation.
Multigenerational

stories are my JAM and this did not disappoint in the slightest, I read somewhere that this is loosely based on the author's family and so I can see why this book was a decade in the making.


My last thought has to do with generational stories overall, but its something I wish to note here.


There was some slight confusion as I tried to grasp whose point of view we were listening to in the beginning.
Once I got the rhythm down, I didn't want to stop reading, I become increasingly annoyed with my generation when reading these books, Most of the time, we are depicted as vapid, money hungry with no regard or appreciation for the past.
The steady decline in American life in large part due to loosely regulated capitalism and corporate greed makes me want to vomit.
Being born in the early's, I remember enough about life with department stores, catalogues, corner/general stores essentially a more small town feel.
I think with advances in technology and globalization there are a lot of positives, but it makes me wish I could take a time machine and visit the world my grandparents grew up in.
Make no mistake, I'm not naive enough to think their lives were perfect, but I think human beings had a lot more appreciation for their work, their reputations, their word and how they treated one another than we do now.
It really makes me so sad that so many contemporaries have little to no appreciation for the hard work and sacrifices of our ancestors.
How hard they worked to make our lives better and how little we regard those struggles because we are so busy living our lives.
I want to make it clear that I also think we have a lot more to contend with than previous generations, particularly in a world where therules everyone else this is before COVID, but I think the American way of life that my grandparents fought for is dying and I sincerely hope that my generation realizes this and is able to lead us to a better and happier place soon.
Didn't mean to opine for so long about this since it's a little off topic, but the book brought up some very strong feelings for me on this topic.
Apologies for the soap box!

I cannot urge you enough to read this book and I sincerely hope you do.


Thank you to Scribner and Martha McPhee for sending me a print copy to review, Thank you also to Netgalley for providing an egalley to review as well,

Date:
Publication Date: "She noticed that the triptych was hinged, and she adjusted the panels, just slightly, until suddenly the mirrors were at such an angle to catch the image of herself in the gorgeous gown, a bridean infinite number of bridesrepeating into the distance.
She touched one of the mirrors and a chain of linked brides seemed to bend off into a greenish, smiling endlessness, as if all of history converged upon a single moment, which it does, she thought, listening to the swish of fabric on the floor, before she moved againand the moment moved tooand became part of the past.
"

I chose this title because I liked the cover, and delighted upon the discovery of the above paragraph, about threequarters of the way in.
It is a gorgeous metaphor, and very fitting for the storyline, McPhee details several generations of women with keen insight, gentle aplomb, and of course, as the title suggests, elegance.


rounded down from a low, because not only was I disappointed at the lack of diversity in the novel, I was frustrated with the lack of acknowledgment of that lack of diversity.
Three and fiveyearold children who grew up in rural Ohio inmight indeed be embarrassed or frightened by encounters with Black men on a train, but the interaction or lack thereof should be handled with sensitivity while still contextualizing.


The encounters these overwhelmingly white characters havewhether it be Glenna, Tommy, her daughters, or her daughter's daughterswith Black and brown individuals feel thrownin, almost forced.
Slavery and the Trail of Tears are mentioned as they might be in a textbook footnoted, when more than likely, Glenna and her contemporaries would have witnessed these atrocities firsthand.
Opportunities were lost by McPhee when she limited her sweeping opera to an allCaucasian cast,

Even near the end of the novel, lightskinned Zasu whose Black father and white mother raise eyebrows in the family and her identity are sensationalized rather than celebrated.
As McPhee writes in the voice of her narrator: "Sometimes I wondered if it would have been different for us had she Zasu been dark skinned, if we would have had to think more about her.
" Zasu never speaks for herself she's footnoted as peripheral, rather than a person, McPhee implies that Zasu's biracial parentage makes her something of a scandal, and by limiting her narrator's comprehension of race to mere shades of pigmentation, the lastditch attempt at diversification undermines itself.
McPhee sees color, but can she contextualize it Reveal its culture as she's spent nearlypages developing her Caucasian narrator and the woman's "salt of the earth" ancestry

"Salt of the earth," yes, is a phrase employed for their family, who came to the United States from Europe in boats though not in chains and went west, building their lives from scratch, claims McPhee, though the land never belonged to them to begin with.


As a final and altogether unrelated note, I cringed as a nearyearold at McPhee's last chapters, as she tried to draw younger generations to join the older, with.
. . Snapchat. McPhee's weak analogy of the social media's "My Story" feature, compared to the idea of one's own story, one's history and biography, landed far offtarget.
.