For the young women living in Boston's North End in 1908, the Saturday Evening Girls Club is an escape from the drudgery of daily life. For Caprice, Ada, Maria and Thea, it's the one time each week the friends can be together. They support each other's dreams and help each other navigate romances and family clashes, cultural prejudices, loss and heartbreak. Through it all one thing is certain - they could not get through it all without their friendship, and the Saturday Evening Girls Club.

The handmade ceramics of the Paul Revere Pottery, often enlivened with stylized images of animals, flowers or abstract patterns, are best known today by the name of the girls' club whose members created the wares: the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG). Local reformers organized this club in 1899 to provide cultural activities for young Italian and Jewish immigrants of Boston's North End. Under the guidance of designer and illustrator Edith Brown, and as a way of helping with difficult family finances, the group soon turned to crafts. Before long, SEG ceramics had caught on, and were being sold through department stores in cities throughout the Eastern United States; though their success was largely curtailed by World War I, the pottery continued to operate until 1942. Today, SEG ware is highly collectible. Art and Reform offers a briskly written, handsomely illustrated introduction to this episode in Boston's cultural history, discussing the role of the SEG club in the life of the city's immigrant community and its ties to education reform and the Arts and Crafts movement. The book presents some 50 examples of the ceramics themselves, mostly by Sara Galner, one of the group's most gifted members, showing the wit, charm, quiet beauty and lasting influence of these remarkable decorative objects.

An eleven-year-old immigrant must clear her name when things start disappearing from a Boston settlement house Innocenza Moretti’s parents died in a fire when she was two. Ever since, she’s lived with her grandmother and seven lodgers in the flat downstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins in a crowded tenement in Boston’s North End. Innie’s world changes when she and her cousin Teresa become members of a settlement house where immigrant girls can learn more about American life. Best of all, they’ll get to participate in a library club. At school, Innie has to share books with two or three other girls. Having her own books would be like eating Sunday dinner every day. The girls’ first assignment at the settlement house is unpacking books that had to be moved because of the recent fire that tore through the city. But now valuable things are vanishing: a pottery mug. A silver teapot. Money. And the prime suspect is Innie! With the help of Teresa and their new friend Matela Rosen, Innie searches for the real culprit. A secret tunnel under Copp’s Hill Burying Ground leads them to a surprising thief. This ebook includes a historical afterword.

New York Times bestseller! An unforgettable novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, told “with humor and optimism…through the eyes of an irresistible heroine” (People)—from the acclaimed author of The Red Tent. Anita Diamant’s “vivid, affectionate portrait of American womanhood” (Los Angeles Times), follows the life of one woman, Addie Baum, through a period of dramatic change. Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t imagine—a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, to finding the love of her life, eighty-five-year-old Addie recounts her adventures with humor and compassion for the naïve girl she once was. Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Diamant’s previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world. “Diamant brings to life a piece of feminism’s forgotten history” (Good Housekeeping) in this “inspirational…page-turning portrait of immigrant life in the early twentieth century” (Booklist).

First Published by Lake Union Publishing, 2019.

Meet the Melendys! The four Melendy children live with their father and Cuffy, their beloved housekeeper, in a worn but comfortable brownstone in New York City. There's thirteen-year-old Mona, who has decided to become an actress; twelve-year-old mischievous Rush; ten-and-a-half-year-old Randy, who loves to dance and paint; and thoughtful Oliver, who is just six. Tired of wasting Saturdays doing nothing but wishing for larger allowances, the four Melendys jump at Randy's idea to start the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club (I.S.A.A.C.). If they pool their resources and take turns spending the whole amount, they can each have at least one memorable Saturday afternoon of their own. Before long, I.S.A.A.C. is in operation and every Saturday is definitely one to remember. Written more than half a century ago, The Saturdays unfolds with all the ripe details of a specific place and period but remains, just the same, a winning, timeless tale. The Saturdays is the first installment of Enright's Melendy Quartet, an engaging and warm series about the close-knit Melendy family and their surprising adventures.

Anna Cavanaugh is a restless young widow and brilliant French teacher at a private school in Washington, DC. Everything changes when she's recruited into the Office of Strategic Services by family friend and legendary WWI hero Major General William Donovan.