The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie

The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie has the description: One Sewing Machine. Two Families. Three secrets. Four generations.

The author was a career nurse turned fabric dyer and textile enthusiast. She was inspired to write this novel by a Singer 99K found near the Singer sewing factory where it was made, which she purchased for 20 pounds.

The Sewing Machine was crowd funded by subscription and published through Unbound. Readers can pledge for a book at unbound.com.

I thought it would be interesting to read a book that was published this way, and of course the focus on home sewing was a perk.

The story, set in Scotland, begins in 1911 and jumps across the century to 2016.

The world of each time setting is described, from the fortnightly shampoo and set to the refillable compact for woman’s facial powder, the rise of unions and WWI. As character Connie thinks, "the constant push to re-do and change was overwhelming sometimes." Characters must adapt as the century brings huge changes. Nurses leave off starched hats and cuffs and pinned aprons for zipped uniforms and paper hats. I never considered the huge learning curve required when the hand cranked sewing machine was replaced by electric.

As an American, I was Goggling a variety of things to find their American equivalent. I got that a broadside was a newspaper and understood the concept of a boot sale. (That is not about low prices on winter books, but a flea market out of car trunks!) I had no idea of what a kirby grip is: it is a bobby pin.

In 1911 the Singer sewing machine factory workers in Clydebank, Scotland, organized for a strike. Factory worker Jean’s boyfriend Donald is a union organizer. Scientific Management was the new business model with its emphasis on efficiency and profit. The result was decreasing the number of workers thus increasing the work load.  Jean’s father is anti-union and he turns her out of the house. When the strike fails, Jean and Donald leave town. But first she hides a secret note, wrapped tightly around a bobbin that is inserted into a new sewing machine. During WWI Donald "takes the king's shilling" and joins the service.

In 1954 Connie, a nurse, is living with Kathleen, who has always sewn on an old Singer sewing machine which her first husband purchased for her. It outlasts the 1963 electric model bought by her second husband Alf. Connie decides to seek employment in the sewing department for the local "co-operative" hospital.

In 1980 Ruth is a nurse at the hospital. Unmarried and pregnant, she has been rejected by her parents. Jean has an accident and ends up in the hospital. She has a letter to be mailed and Ruth agrees to handle it. Meantime, a woman from the sewing department helps alter Ruth's nursing uniform to hide the pregnancy.

In 2016 Fred has inherited his Granda Alf’s tenement apartment, complete with a cat and an old Singer sewing machine. Three generations have lived in the flat. Fred is unemployed and when he considers keeping the flat his girl dumps him. He learns to use the old Singer to remake Granda’s clothes and shoe bags for the neighbor kids.

The multiple time and story lines are a bit confusing at times, but this kind of plot structure is not unusual today. The scenes are full of period detail, told with a loving nostalgia about the old ways. Mysteries and relationships are revealed in the end, all tied to the Singer sewing machine.

Readers who are sewers will particularly enjoy this book, but also those who enjoy historical fiction, woman's fiction, and character-driven plot lines.

I revived a free book from the publisher through Net Galley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, in Edinburgh, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than 100 years after his grandmother's sewing machine was made, Fred discovers a treasure trove of documents. His family history is laid out before him in a patchwork of unfamiliar handwriting and colourful seams. He starts to unpick the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.

Sewing Machine
by Natalie Fergie
Unbound Digital
Pub Date 17 Apr 2017 

Janesville: An American Story

"History. Vision. Grit."  Janesville City Hall Mural

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein has won many accolades, including 100 Notable Books in 2017 from the New York Times Book Review and the McKinsey Business Book of the Year. 

Goldstein presents the story of a town and its people coping with the closing of the GM factory and how the town and families worked to reinvent themselves. 

Janesville, WI was a tight-knit community with a successful history of factories beginning with cotton mills in the late 19th c, including Parker Pens and the GM auto assembly plant and the factories that supplied it.

The book covers five years, beginning in 2008 with Paul Ryan, a Janesville native, receiving the phone call from GM informing him of their decision to close the Janesville plant. Goldstein portrays the impact on employees and their families: the cascading job losses, the ineffectual retraining programs, the engulfing poverty, the men who take employment at plants in other states and see their families a few hours a week, teenagers working to help keep food on the table while preparing for college.  

This is one of those non-fiction books that is engrossing while being informative, bringing readers into the struggles, successes, and failures of individual families. If you want to know about the people who have lost the American Dream, the impact of business and political decisions, and what programs 'work' and which have not delivered, then Janesville is for you.

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein
Simon & Schuster
$16 paperback
ISBN 9781501102264

Getting Personal

I married into a GM family. My father-in-law had a white-collar job at Fisher Body in Flint and ordered supplies to be sent to Janesville, WI. My husband worked as a welder on the line several summers while in college.

My father-in-law's Fisher Body pins

In 1931, my thirteen-year-old father-in-law lost his father to TB. His mother soon remarried and a year later was divorced. She had a Fourth Grade education and was sixteen when married. She had two sons to support. That is when she went to work for GM in Flint.

I noted her family all called her Girl. I learned the nickname dated to when she was the only woman on the floor and when the men wanted her help, they would call, "Girl!"

Girl was part of the Woman's Emergency Brigade and delivered food during the 1936-7 sit-down strike and was a proud Union member.

Girl's oldest boy, like his dad, had TB. Her youngest son worked for the CCC, took classes at Baker College, and got a job as a clerk at the auto factory where his mother was a machine operator. Together, in 1940, their income was $2,228.

When my husband and I would visit his folks sometimes they would take us on a drive to see the old factories. And over the years we were very aware of how, briefly, the auto industry offered our families great opportunities. My father-in-law sent three boys to college and had a comfortable early retirement. My own father had relocated to Metro Detroit for a job in the auto industry, and we had a good working-class life and important benefits as my mother suffered from chronic health issues. 

from the publisher's website:

* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 *

“A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience” (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)—an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.

This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down—but it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it’s so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class.

Gateway To The Moon: Rediscovering A Family's History

In 1478 the Spanish Inquisition was established. The year that Columbus went on his first voyage of discovery, 1492, was also the year that all Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain. Unless they converted to Christianity--or preferred to be burned at the stake.

The Christian Jews outwardly lived like Christians, attending mass, but secretly clung to their way of life, lighting candles on Friday, avoiding pork, and circumcising their sons.

So, the Conversos were targeted, massacred, imprisoned, tortured, and burned. The Jews fled to the New World, but the Inquisition followed to Mexico and the Jews moved into New Mexico.

Gateway to the Moon by Mary Morris imagines the story of one Jewish/Converso family whose ancestor, Luis de Torres, came to the New World with Columbus, following the Torres family through the 15th and 16th centuries and into the 20th century.

Living in Entada de la Luna, the Torres are good Catholics who traditionally light candles on Friday night, disdain to eat pork, and circumcise their sons. The cemetery holds generations of their ancestors. The townsfolk know that their ancestors came from Spain but no longer remember what brought them there.

The story is told in two timelines, telling the contemporary story of Miguel Torres, a teenager with a passion for astronomy, and that of his ancestors beginning with Luis de Torres, a secret Jew born Leni Halvri before the Alhambra Decree.

The horrific history of the Inquisition is revealed through the lives of the Torres family, providing drama and intrigue to the slower, more introspective story of Miguel. Miguel's world has also has its violence and sorrow.

Morris's beautiful writing is a pleasure to read. Miguel is a wonderful, memorable character. And it was interesting to learn about this part of history. I very much enjoyed this novel, a combination of historical fiction, contemporary fiction, and family history.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Find a reading group guide at http://knopfdoubleday.com/guide/9780385542906/_/?ref=PRHC04BC8369A03&linkid=PRHC04BC8369A03&cdi=169C16BF8CF47BCCE0534FD66B0A6668&template_id=8912&aid=randohouseinc23295-20

Gateway to the Moon
Mary Morris
Doubleday Books
Publication Date: April 10, 2018
$27.95 hardcover
ISBN: 9780385542906

Bewitched by Madeline Miller's Circe

Madeline Miller's new novel Circe was mesmerizing. I did not want to stop reading! It was unexpected, this absorption in a book about a Greek mythic figure.

I had read the Greek Myths (Robert Graves's two volumes!) and Homer and Virgil--all the classics-- long ago in high school and college. I knew Circe from these tales.

But Miller's book is more than a retelling of the myths. Circe comes alive in these pages. And if, yes, the characters are Titans and Olympians and heroes, it took no trouble for my suspension of belief to accept them. Perhaps due to the prevalence of magic and witches and superhuman power in literature and film today. But I credit Miller's amazing writing.

Circe's world holds to a tenuous peace between the powerful Titans and the upstart Olympians. These gods are vengeful and imperious, all-powerful and eternal. She is the daughter of Helios, a golden-eyed child overlooked and dismissed, her very voice offensive to the gods.

She has been fascinated by mortal humans ever since Prometheus gave them fire, earning the punishment of eternal torment. Secretly, she brings the bound Prometheus a cup of nectar. Circe the dejected is also a girl of will and defiance.

She also makes many mistakes.

She discovers her gift for witchcraft, the use of herbs and will to cause transformation. She employs her power to transform the mortal man she loves. But he loves another and Circe transforms her rival Scylla into her true form--a man-eating multi-armed monster. The gods punish Circle by exiling her to a deserted island.

On her island, Circe spends centuries perfecting her craft with herbs, her friends the wild beasts and the occasional exiled nymph. She is visited by the gossip Hermes who becomes her lover, and the inventive Daedalus who gifts her a magnificent loom. Later, Daedalus needs her to help him entrap her sister's monstrous child, the Minotaur.

Sailors sometimes land on her shore; she learned not to trust them and turns them into swine. Then arrives the weary Odysseus; his enemy Athena has beset his journey home from the Trojan War with cruel trials. He stays with Circe for a year, changing her life forever.

I need to read Miller's previous book The Song of Achilles! I already have it on my Kindle. She is a marvelous story teller.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Circe
by Madeline Miller
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 10 Apr 2018
ISBN: 9780316556347
PRICE: $27.00 (USD)

Puss in the Corner Antique Quilt Top

Last week I shared an antique quilt top gifted to me by a friend. I have another early 1900s quilt top in my collection, purchased many years ago at the Royal Oak Flea Market.

The block pattern is Puss in the Corner. The blocks are set side by side with a wide sashing in a mourning print, popular around 1890 to 1925, and cinnamon pink squares at the corners. Double or cinnamon pink was common between 1860 and 1920.

The block pattern is very simple, consisting of a center square, four rectangles, and four corner squares.

What made this quilt stand out for me was the sashing fabric, a busy black, white, and gray print of circles and filigree shape. Seen close up, the border print keeps the eye moving across the quilt. From a distance, it almost looks gray.

Mourning prints, also called Shaker Gray, Lenox Gray, and Silver Gray, were popular until 1925. In her book Making History, Barbara Brackman quotes a Montgomery Ward catalog as calling them appropriate for 'elderly ladies.'

The fabrics in this top are typical of the late 1900s and early 20th c. Mourning prints, navy and cadet blue prints, shirtings, woven checks, and double pinks make up the majority of the fabrics, with some browns and wines.

In the photo below is a white on navy floral print, a blue check, and a mourning print.

In the center of the quilt is a yellow calico print, a splash of brightness used in only two blocks. Perhaps it represents a glint of hope.

Turkey red was a colorfast dye that was highly popular through the 1920s when it was replaced by newer dyes. In the photo below are two turkey red prints, a cadet blue polka dot fabric, and a black and white mourning print in a floral stripe.

Below is a block with several cadet blue fabrics, typical of 1880s to 1910. Also, a navy blue with a print in small dots forming a background image for a floating floral shape. The center square is an interesting mourning print in bubble shapes.

 There are also woven checks and a few brown prints.

There are not as many fabrics in claret or wine on this quilt, which was typical of quilts 1880-1910. Below, upper right, is an example.

 The top was hand sewn with with thread.

These fabrics are in quite good condition and the top was not washed.

Free online patterns for Puss in the Corner can be found at

http://qacdg.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Block-9P-Puss-in-A-Corner-PAIR.pdf

https://www.all-about-quilts.com/support-files/pussinthecornerrotarycutting.pdf

A downloadable pattern for $6 is available at
https://www.keepsakequilting.com/puss-in-the-corner-digital-pattern

After Anna by Lisa Scottoline

There was life before Anna, and there was life after Anna. There was a happy marriage, then there was distrust and heartbreak. And it all fell apart, after Anna.

Lisa Scottoline's After Anna is a riveting story of the destruction of a marriage, innocent imprisonment, and a mother's deep love.

Noah and Maggie have created a happy life together, both having overcome past tragedy. Maggie's postpartum mental state led to her being institutionalized, her husband divorcing her, taking sole custody of their infant daughter. Noah lost his wife and raised his son alone until falling for Maggie. They are truly happy together.

Maggie is ecstatic when her daughter Anna, now seventeen, contacts her. With the death of her father and step-mother, Anna wants Maggie in her life and asks to be taken in. Noah is supportive. They will be a happy blended family.

Maggie is desperate to make up for failing Anna as an infant, and Anna uses that guilt to manipulate her. Noah insists that Anna follow house rules and parental guidance. Anna is not pleased.

Everything goes wrong. Anna accuses Noah of sexual advances and takes out a restraining order. And when Anna turns up dead, Noah is the prime suspect and is convicted of her murder. Maggie is devastated and preparing to sue for divorce when she is contacted by Anna's school therapist and everything Maggie thought she knew is turned upside down.

The novel is told in two time lines, Noah and Maggie before Anna's arrival and leading up to her death, and Noah on trial and in prison 'after Anna.'

It is an entertaining read that I didn't want to put down. As usual, Scottoline delivers a novel with suspense, human interest, and a twist of contemporary social concerns, with lots of courtroom and legal scenes.

I received a free e-book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

After Anna
by Lisa Scottoline
St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 9781250099655
PRICE: $27.99

Voices From the Rust Belt

Voices From the Rust Belt is an offering of essays edited by Anne Trubek on the legacy of a post-industrial world in the once great manufacturing centers including Buffalo, Detroit, Flint, Akron, and Chicago.

I found these essays to be beautifully written and personally moving. I savored each essay, reading them one at a time. The stories are about places I know, stories I am familiar with.

These are stories that break my heart.

Getting Personal

I am a Rust Belt girl.

I spent my first ten years of life just north of Buffalo until 1963 when my family moved to the Detroit suburbs so my dad could find work in the auto industry. With a high school education and hands-on experience, he was able to get a good job with benefits. My grandfather was a GM engineer, my brother is a Ford engineer, and other family members worked on the line.

My husband is from outside of Flint, MI, where his father worked at Fisher Body and his grandmother, a GM employee, was in the Woman's Brigade during the famous sit-down strike. My husband's brother was the third generation to be a Flint resident and he raised his children there.

Union pins that belonged to Valdora 'Girl' Bekofske

As a young wife, I lived in and around Philadelphia, including in one of the earliest industrial centers, surrounded by empty factories. We returned to Michigan, for a while living in Lansing a short way from the downtown GM assembly plant. At retirement, we moved into my family home in Metro Detroit.

Our families were lucky. Dad often mused that he had seen the best days of working in the auto industry.  Dad survived several downsizing cuts thanks to his seniority. My dad-in-law took advantage of early retirement and lived into his nineties, spending more time retired than in his career. But he had to watch the Flint and Grand Blanc plants die.

Looking Deeper Between the Pages

The book is divided into thematic sections.

Growing Up

• Jaqueline Marino's A Girl's Youngstown begins with memories of the 1970s pollution that made her and her sister hold their breath when crossing the Market Street Bridge. It made me recall the smell of entering Tonawanda, driving up the River Road past the Ashland gasoline storage tanks.
• The Kidnapped Children of Detroit by Marsha Music recalls White Flight and ponders how today Detroit can move forward without the crippling divisions of the past. 
• Busing, A White Girl's Tale by Amanda Shaffer considers what she gained from the experience. 
• North Park, With and Without Hate by Jeff Z. Klein recounts growing up Jewish in Buffalo when prejudice was out in the open. 
• Life on the "slag heap of society" is presented by David Faulk in Moundsville. In Love and Survival: A Flint Romance, Layla Meiller admits her hometown taught her a pervasive sense of vulnerability.

Day to Day in the Rust Belt

• Dave Newman talks about starting over in mid-life in A Middle-Aged Student's Guide to Social Work as he learns the limitations of social work. 
• Fresh to Death is Eric Woodyard's recounting of his double life drinking in a Flint neighborhood bar at night while working as an award-winning sportswriter by day.  
• Ben Gwin shares a heartbreaking story of addiction in Rust Belt Heroin Chic. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. asks Will Blacks Rise or Be Forgotten in the New Buffalo, proving that the racial division of progress plagues Rust Belt cities other than Detroit. 
• Aaron Foley asks Can Detroit Save White People? 
• Huda Al-Marashi writes about Cleveland's Little Iraq community.

Geography of the Heartland

• John Lloyd Clayton remembers a Cincinnati gay bar in A Night at the Golden Lion Lounge. 
• The lack of identity in assimilated white European families is addressed in Ryan Schnurr's Family Bones. 
• The Fauxtopias of Detroit's Suburbs by James D. Griffioen discusses Henry Ford's legacy, from the Rouge plant to Greenfield Village's idyllic nostalgia that whitewashes history. Eric 
• Anderson juxtaposes working in the steel mills, gentrification, and art in Cleveland in Pretty Things to Hang on the Wall. 
• I learned that "redneck" came from the red bandannas worn by Matewan unionizers in King Coal and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum by Carolyne Whelan. 
• Martha Bayne questions accident or intention in Seed or Weed? 
• On the Evolution of Chicago's Bloomingdale Trail 
• Ecologist 
• Kathryn M. Flinn realizes the diversity of Rust Belt ecology in This Is A Place. 
• Mobility as benefit or detriment is considered in That Better Place; or the Problem with Mobility by G. M. Donley. Donley looks at how historic suburban growth impacted downtowns and offers ways to improve where we live instead of chasing the 'dream home' elsewhere.

Leaving and Staying

• The pursuit of a relationship brings Sally Errico to move in Losing Lakewood. Notes from the Expatriate Underground by Margaret Sullivan is about nostalgic Buffalo natives looking for connection. 
• Confessions of a Rust Belt Orphan; or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Akron by Jason Segedy recalls the 'smell of good jobs' when Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. 
• Our idealistic image of an upward line of progress must be replaced with the cycle of boom and bust. 
• And Connor Coyne talks about what it is like to bath a baby in Flint Water in Bathtime.

Thoughts

Voices from the Rust Belt will be poignant reading for those of us associated with these cities. We will connect with some readings, and definitely will learn we are not alone. I was surprised how Buffalo's experience of white flight was not too unlike Detroit's.

The stories will inform those who want to understand the Rust Belt experience on the personal level. There are essays that dig deeper, dissecting a history of public policy and boom and bust economics that contributed to the decline of these cities. Best of all, included are suggestions for moving forward.

This book would be a good discussion starter in the classroom or in a book club.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Voices from the Rust Belt
by Anne Trubek
Macmillan-Picador
ISBN 9781250162977
PRICE $16.00 (USD)