Books: Charles Bock and Jennifer S. Brown portray Manhattan in earlier eras
"At first glance two historical novels published last week have little in common. Where Charles Bock’s second novel Alice and Oliver is a starkly realistic and unflinching portrait of a marriage undergoing trial by health crisis in 1990s New York, Jennifer S. Brown’s debut novel Modern Girls, on the other hand, is a warm, heimisheh tale of two generations of women in a Jewish immigrant family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1930s whose opportunities and choices were limited by their gender." -- from my 4/13/16 examiner article. Also see my reviews of the two books in New York Journal of Books .