Allegra Maud Goldman Book

I was thinking about my early reading habits the other day, wondering why one of my favorite books as a child was the story of a Depression-era Jewish girl in Brooklyn who came from a well-to-do family, half of whom were in Freudian psychoanalysis. As a kid, this was not exactly a world I could relate to.

So I decided to reread Allegra Maud Goldman, and realized that I loved this book because I loved its smart, sassy narrator, a girl who realizes early on that she is ill-suited to live the kind of pre-feminist life her parents are vainly trying to prepare her for. Despite the differences between her era and my own, Allegra's coming-of-age, coming-into-self story is one that still resonates decades later.