Saint Mazie by Jami AttenbergMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Like nothing I've ever read before. A young girl and her younger sister are brought by the eldest sister and her husband to live with them on the Lower East side of Manhattan. Their father is abusive and Rosie and Louis take them from the parents to protect them. The girls, Mazie and Jeanie, are treated like the children Rosie and Louis will never have. Mazie yearns for freedom and fun--she is the wild girl, the good time girl. Jeanie is the good girl. The book tells of how their lives evolve through entries in Mazie's diary and commentary of neighbors and friends and others who come in contact with, primarily, Mazie for this is her story ultimately.
One character who finds her diary many years after her death cannot put it down and feels as if he knows her. By the end of the book, I felt the same way. Not only her but the City in which she lived from the turn of the century, over the War period, into the 20's through the Depression almost to the start of the Second World War. The City of my parents, ending when I came into it in 1942. A place I know during a time I don't but about a woman who could be one of my Aunts, the youngest of the seven, now 92 years old. The City I've been told about--but probably not ALL there was to tell.
Like the diary finder, I didn't want it to end.
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