Kerri Maher

This novel centers around a group of women, linked by friendship and relationships, who range from deep involvement to the outer perimeter of the Jane Collective, an underground abortion provider in 1970s Chicago. While police surveillance increases, these women find ways to help each other and empower each other to improve their own lives. One of my favorite stories within this novel was that of Patty, a housewife who begins the book deeply suspicious of the work of the Jane Collective and ends the book supportive enough of her friends that she's arrested alongside them. I'm glad to see more novels centered around these themes and I hope to see more about this history, which I don't see represented often enough in historical fiction.… (altro)

Historical fiction written and researched very well. This novel is a fictional portrait of the life of real American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, who opened a famous English-language bookstore and library in Paris in 1919, just after World War I, and also published its first and only book: James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses, which in its serial parts had been banned in the United States. The store, which Sylvia called Shakespeare and Company, was inspired by the Parisian bookstore—eventually called La Maison des Amis des Livres—run by Adrienne Monnier, the woman who would become Sylvia’s lover. When the two stores were across the street from each other on rue de l’Odéon, all the bright lights in the French and English literary worlds converged; Adrienne coined the term for the two stores together: Odeonia. Shakespeare and Company drew all the literary ex-pats living in France during a time in which censorship and morality crusades (the Comstock Act, Prohibition, etc.) made writing life in the United States inhospitable to many artists in terms of censorship and sponsorship. The real patrons of Odeonia were a who’s who of the literary literati—Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, to name a few—and these people appear in the pages of this novel to varying degrees.

The story is written in the third person from Sylvia’s viewpoint, and Ms. Maher convincingly fills in the fictional dialogues and Sylvia’s internal struggles when she is working tirelessly to bring Ulysses to print and her interactions with Joyce himself during the finishing of the writing, the revisions, the printing, and an ugly period when Joyce got Random House to publish it in the United States, cutting Sylvia out of the monetary rewards she might have easily gotten if she had not been a woman. The story seemed to sag in a few places; otherwise, it would have been a five-star review.… (altro)