Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

UNMENTIONABLES

Laurie Loewenstein

The book takes a contemporary look at the women’s undergarment industry, which has historically confined women in constraining articles of clothing.

Marian Elliot Adams, an outspoken advocate for sensible undergarments for women, sweeps onto the Chautauqua stage under a brown canvas tent on a sweltering August night in 1917, and shocks the gathered town of Caledonia with her speech: how can women compete with men in the workplace and in life if they are confined by their undergarments?

Laurie Loewenstein received an MA in creative writing from Wilkes University. She grew up in the flatlands of western Ohio. She now resides in Rochester, New York, where Susan B. Anthony lived and was arrested for voting in 1872.

Available products
Book Published 2014-01-07 by Kaylie Jones Books / Akashic
Book Published 2014-01-07 by Kaylie Jones Books / Akashic

Comments

Laurie Loewenstein’s Unmentionables, a story of prejudice, struggle, and redemption, is compulsively readable and immensely seductive. Buffeted by the immense societal changes surrounding World War I, Loewenstein’s characters—deftly drawn and as familiar to the reader as friends from childhood—fight for love, equality, and ultimately justice in a world awash in the volatile cusp of change. At once intimate and wide-ranging, Unmentionables illuminates both the triumph and cost of sacrifice, along with its hard-won rewards.

Laurie Loewenstein’s Unmentionables transports the reader to a time not that long ago—when women were not allowed to vote and racial prejudice was commonplace—when so much was different, but human nature was so much the same. Treating us to a captivating narrative that illuminates as it entertains, Loewenstein reminds us that it is the courage and integrity of individual people that changes the world.

Laurie Loewenstein brings the reader into the past, to Chautauqua assemblies, World War I France, and Midwestern small-town life. But like all good historical fiction, Unmentionables uses the past as a way to illuminate large, pertinent ques- tions—of race and gender, of love and death, of action and consequence. Meticulously researched and exquisitely written, Unmentionables is a memorable debut.

I loved this beautiful book, set amid the cornfields and treelined streets of a quiet Illinois farm town during the First World War. Loewenstein’s ability to create a moment in history is authoritative and accurate. I was lost in that world, believed every word of it, and loved and wept with the delicately drawn characters. Love, fear, shame, regret, hope, and independence inter- twine as the story moves from farm country to war-torn France and big-city Chicago, replete with anarchists and artists, suf- fragettes, freethinkers, and the working poor. This is a perfect book club pick, dealing with real history, real issues that are still relevant today, and real and unforgettable characters.