Breaking with the expected role of a woman in her era, she gains respect with the kind of grit one expects from a heroine. There is little that we can assume without Egan’s surprising us.Īnna, who is something of a loner, beats the odds and the prejudices of her co-workers to become the only woman diver doing repairs on ships. It soon becomes clear that nothing is wasted in this novel, and the reader had better pay close attention. But the first scenes are crucial to where the characters are headed. Egan quickly moves to Anna in her late teens working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Set mostly in Brooklyn against the backdrop of the Great Depression and World War II, the novel begins with precocious eleven-year-old Anna and her father, Eddie, in a brief encounter with Dexter Styles and his daughter, Tabitha, on Manhattan Beach near Coney Island.
We quickly fall in love with Anna Kerrigan and her story in this straightforward and exquisitely rendered historical novel. Readers have come to expect novels that experiment with form and structure from Jennifer Egan, but Manhattan Beach proves that expectations can be unmet in a spectacularly positive way.
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