Fashion, book, movie and music addicts!

One of the nicest things about reading a book is being carried away so completely that everything else falls away. You look up from reading and hours have passed by, so completely were you immersed in the story. This is the feeling you'll get from reading Away by Amy Bloom.
The story revolves around Lilian Leyb who loses her family in a horrific pogrom in Russia. She makes her way to America where she ends up a seamstress in the Burstein theater and subsequently the mistress of both father and son. One day her cousin brings her news that her daughter Sophie, whom she believes perished in the pogrom is alive. And currently living in Siberia. She has no choice but to go and find Sophie. What distinguishes the trip she makes is that she decides to go all across the width of the US till she reaches the Canada where she will sail the Yukon river till it she reaches the Bering Straight where she will finally cross over to Siberia. Needless to say her journey is fraught with all sorts of danger and involves encounters with prostitutes, jail inmates and lonely telegraph operators all across the Yukon line.
The words well written and moving doesn’t even begin to cover this virtuoso work by Bloom. She has written a special kind of road trip novel that is by turns funny, sexy, bitter, sometimes shocking and always intelligent. Lilian is quite a character and I mean that in the best possible sense. The things that happen to her are at times incomprehensible but Bloom’s writing makes it all believable and its not hard to be swept away by the story.
I don’t know why its only now that I’ve discovered Amy Bloom, but after reading Away, I am now off to discover more of her previous works.