Tag Archives: Family history books

Another wonderful review of The Women Before Us!

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Thank you so much to Luanne Castle for her wonderful review of The Women Before Us.  Luanne is an amazing award-winning poet and author (as well as a genealogy blogger at The Family Kalamazoo), so her words of praise mean a great deal to me. I recently reviewed her latest book, Scrap, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Here are a few excerpts from her review:

As a genealogist and family history blogger, Cohen has completed the mountains of research necessary to delve into the lives of these people. But Cohen doesn’t leave it at the usual pedigrees and timelines. Her research leads her to explorations of personality and motivation. She does this in her books and on her blog.

This time, Cohen focuses on the lives of the women of three generations of Jewish women and how their lives are determined by who they marry. This can lead to happiness or it can lead to misery….The brains of this book is the way it demonstrates how dependent women were on their marriages. These women were not Orthodox Jews, but like all women of their time, they had little chance of a life outside of marriage. And who they married dictated whether their lives would be hard or less so, happy, or even unsafe. …

All night I dreamed about the book, the characters inhabiting every dream I had. Edna, Mae, James, Harriet, and the others. It’s hard to believe that these are not Cohen’s actual relatives, but these fictional people were touched with the magic of Cohen’s sympathetic understanding of her own grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

You can read Luanne’s whole review here.

A reminder to those who read the book: I am happy to speak with your book groups or libraries about The Women Before Us. Just let me know.

 

 

Another Five Star Review!

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Another five star review of The Women Before Us! This one is from Helen Joyce, the acclaimed author of the wonderful book, Good for a Single Journey. I am so pleased that she enjoyed my book! She wrote:
A thoughtful and moving story of three generations of diverse women from one Jewish family. Spanning a period from the late 19th century to post-WWII, the tale moves between Philadelphia, Denver and Santa Fe. Describing women with different lives relationships and experiences, the book ties together the universal themes of love, marriage, childbirth, grief and loss. Matriarchy and its evolving role over time is a central theme. Thoughtful, well written and researched.
I hope you all will also enjoy The Women Before Us.
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Coming Soon! A New Family History Novel: The Women Before Us

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Coming in a few weeks! My latest family history novel, The Women Before Us, will be available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon!

The Women Before Us was inspired by the stories of my female ancestors and relatives, women who had little power in the outside world and often little power over their own lives. Many of them married and then moved far from their families and friends to start a life with a man they probably hardly knew and in many cases didn’t even choose. Many then gave birth to numerous babies, often losing some of those babies as infants or young children to diseases that today are easily treated or prevented. And many faced painful obstacles—poverty, illness, unhappy marriages—but persisted nevertheless.

And so many of these women then watched their own daughters endure the same kinds of choices and painful decisions and losses.

In The Women Before Us, we see how this pattern plays out in one family, the family of Edna Schwartz, a young woman who falls head over heels in love with a man who lives far from where she and her family live, a man she has known only for a very brief time. Will she marry him and leave her family behind? Will she find happiness? Will she learn from the experiences of her mother and grandmother and the other women before them?

Read my latest book and find out. If you like family history, if you like love stories, and/or if you are interested in stories about the lives of women, you will enjoy this book. It is a work of fiction, but inspired by the people I’ve discovered through my family history research and by the times and places they lived in.

The book will be available on Amazon in multiple formats starting June 20, 2026. More information to come as we approach publication!