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.