Leaving Lucy Pear

Description:

Inadvertently reunited with the daughter she secretly abandoned and the girl's Irish Catholic adoptive mother during the height of the Prohibition era, the adult daughter of a Jewish industrialist finds her life turned upside down by her daughter's bold and unconventional personality. 1917. Beatrice Haven-- Jewish, unwed-- sneaks out of her uncle's house on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, leaves her newborn baby at the foot of a pear tree, and watches as another woman claims the infant as her own. Ten years later Prohibition is in full swing, post-WWI America is in the grips of rampant xenophobia, and Bea's hopes for her future remain unfulfilled. Returning to her uncles house she meets Emma Murphy, the headstrong Irish Catholic woman who has been raising Bea's abandoned child-- now a bright, bold, cross-dressing girl named Lucy Pear.

subjects: Mothers and daughters,  Abandoned children,  Nineteen twenties,  Fiction,  Birthmothers,  New York Times reviewed,  Fiction, historical, general,  Mothers and daughters, fiction,  Massachusetts, fiction,  Jews, fiction,  FICTION

Places: Ann, Cape (Mass.)