I found this book quite disappointing; it seemed to be one long line of cliches punctuated now and again by some token Yiddish. Given how much I liked The Red Tent, that was quite disappointing.

Perhaps the trouble is that the idea of writing a story about the early twentieth century immigrant experience has already been done, and has been done much better - for example, see Brooklyn. Boston Girl takes that idea, moves it from Brooklyn to Boston’s North End, swaps out Catholicism for Judaism, and subtracts all of the compelling characters and gripping writing with… well, a text of a certain length. That’s not a very good formula.

It’s also a text which happens to name-check just about every major historical development of the early twentieth century, almost in comical fashion. There was, oddly enough, no mention of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial… but otherwise, Diamant seems to have contorted her narrative to read something like an illustrated history book. I’m really not sure why that was necessary, but it seemd very forced and unnatural.

I was less than impressed, also, by the plain flatness of the characters - the overbearing unloving mother, the goodie-two-shoes daughter, the reflexively religiously strict daughter - and more than that by the inconsistency in their reaction to events as they unfold. For example - I fail to believe that a girl with overprotective parents can skip town for a week and come back home without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Despite all that, I suppose I did like the story at some basic level, and there was a degree of enjoyability to it. It was also interesting to read about the Boston of a hundred years ago, although I’d qualify that by saying that I’ve read other historical Boston books and I generally find them much more fascinating - The Namesake, for example, comes to mind.

I can’t say I’d recommend this book, as I simply found it a chore to read, but it did have a certain base level of charm and enjoyability.