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Dec. 11th, 2016 01:32 pmI'm a little sad the cover of the copy of Belva Plain's Crescent City that I snagged off the free bookshelf at the Traveler Restaurant is not as amazingly EIGHTIES! HISTORICAL!! as the one on the Goodreads page, but we can't have everything.
Anyway, I grabbed Crescent City because, EIGHTIES! HISTORICAL!! aside, it's about a Jewish family in New Orleans during the Civil War -- not a thing one sees frequently in historical romance -- and I was super curious how that would play out.
(Sidenote: I'd never heard of Belva Plain before, but apparently she was basically like the Jewish Philippa Gregory and spent the 80s and 90s writing tons of bestselling books about Jewish women having dramatic historical times and/or Contemporary Issues. Reviews seem to think Crescent City is pretty same-old as far as her stuff goes, but it was new to me!)
Crescent City starts out when Ferdinand, a formerly poor European Jew who has Made His Fortune in New Orleans, comes home to collect his two kids David and Miriam from their aunt and grandpa in the shtetl and bring them to their new life of Southern debutante wealth and fortune!
( And then, eventually, the Civil War, but it takes a while )
I'm not sure I necessarily need to seek out anything else by Belva Plain after this, but I am glad I picked up and read this one. The book is, you know, the kind of EIGHTIES! HISTORICAL!! that it is, and certainly its Jewish-but-nonetheless-extremely-white perspective on the Civil War leaves a LOT of room for intersectional improvement, but it is pretty cool to see historical fiction about Jewish people that has the fact of their Jewishness interwoven into the story without making specifically-Jewish-suffering the entire point and plot. And there's still not a whole lot of that going around.
Anyway, I grabbed Crescent City because, EIGHTIES! HISTORICAL!! aside, it's about a Jewish family in New Orleans during the Civil War -- not a thing one sees frequently in historical romance -- and I was super curious how that would play out.
(Sidenote: I'd never heard of Belva Plain before, but apparently she was basically like the Jewish Philippa Gregory and spent the 80s and 90s writing tons of bestselling books about Jewish women having dramatic historical times and/or Contemporary Issues. Reviews seem to think Crescent City is pretty same-old as far as her stuff goes, but it was new to me!)
Crescent City starts out when Ferdinand, a formerly poor European Jew who has Made His Fortune in New Orleans, comes home to collect his two kids David and Miriam from their aunt and grandpa in the shtetl and bring them to their new life of Southern debutante wealth and fortune!
( And then, eventually, the Civil War, but it takes a while )
I'm not sure I necessarily need to seek out anything else by Belva Plain after this, but I am glad I picked up and read this one. The book is, you know, the kind of EIGHTIES! HISTORICAL!! that it is, and certainly its Jewish-but-nonetheless-extremely-white perspective on the Civil War leaves a LOT of room for intersectional improvement, but it is pretty cool to see historical fiction about Jewish people that has the fact of their Jewishness interwoven into the story without making specifically-Jewish-suffering the entire point and plot. And there's still not a whole lot of that going around.
