Josephine defied all expectations when she ran away from home as a young teen in the 1870s and, though she returned, she didn\u2019t do so for long. She left home again in 1880, at age 19, with a promise of marriage from Johnny Behan, a man she met on her first foray into the Wild West from the relative safety and security of San Francisco.<\/p>\n
While the spirits of the dead might have haunted her mother, Josephine learned how brutal the living world could be when she arrived in Tombstone, Ariz. A shonda<\/em> (shame) to her family \u2013 though her father and three siblings are portrayed as more understanding than her mother \u2013 Josephine becomes a shame to herself.<\/p>\n Johnny doesn\u2019t follow through on his promises; in fact, he\u2019s a cad who cheats and lies to get his way, including betraying Wyatt in order to become sheriff of the county. The position came with power, and money, but Johnny also knew of Josephine and Wyatt\u2019s attraction to each other, so revenge was also a motivation. As well, Wyatt was a marshal \u2013 a position that deals with federal issues \u2013 and there was still unrest stemming from the Civil War. Johnny was friendly with the cowboy crowd, which generally voted Democrat and were sympathetic to the Confederates, if not Confederate veterans themselves, while Wyatt and his brothers were Republicans. These political differences no doubt played a part in the men\u2019s animosity for each other.<\/p>\n Josephine eventually leaves Johnny, after one particularly harrowing experience in which he places her as a bet in cards and loses, and another in which she catches him mid-dalliance. On her own, she finally starts to understand a woman\u2019s terrifyingly narrow set of survival choices \u2013 not that men were much more secure at that time and in that place. Wyatt must also fend for his life, and not just at the shoot-out at OK Corral.<\/p>\n All told, The Last Woman Standing<\/em> is a fascinating tale, a western from a woman\u2019s perspective, though it does drag a bit in places. It takes a long time in the narrative for Josephine and Wyatt to finally get together and they aren\u2019t together for that long before Wyatt is a wanted man and must fight for his life. There\u2019s a little too much of Josephine\u2019s pining in the sections in which the lovers are separated, but, otherwise, this is a great read.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Good Girls<\/em> by Shalta Dicaire Fardin and Sarah Sahagian (Inanna Publications and Education, 2016) is a young adult novel that not-so-young adults \u2013 women mainly \u2013 will also enjoy very much.<\/p>\n When we meet Octavia Irving, 15, she\u2019s in the middle of hosting the party of her life at her family\u2019s summer home. And she\u2019s loving it, until her 19-year-old boyfriend leaves early with a bunch of his friends. Fortunately for her, as it turns out, one of those friends vandalizes a neighboring home.<\/p>\n Octavia\u2019s father gets the news during the bar mitzvah of his wife\u2019s nephew. We find out that this is his second marriage and that he had walked out on Octavia\u2019s mother during her pregnancy, \u201cbecause his parents found her bohemian nature objectionable.\u201d We also find out that he has issues with \u201cher lax parenting style.\u201d<\/p>\n So, while Octavia may come from a family with money to spare, the family dynamic is complex. As well, the expectations her parents have of her, and that she has of herself, are low. However, when Octavia tells her father the name of the culprit, and he calls her mother, she knows things are about to seriously change \u2013 \u201cNo matter how badly she misbehaved, her parents had never teamed up against her before.\u201d<\/p>\n Allie Denning, on the other hand, is one of the \u201cgood girls.\u201d She loves being a student at Anne Bradstreet College, an all-girls prep school in Boston. She follows the rules to the letter and is totally focused on doing the best she can. But, no matter what she does, because it comes from a place of privilege, it doesn\u2019t seem good enough for her mother, the daughter of immigrants, who grew up in poverty but managed to get a scholarship to Columbia then go on to graduate with a PhD from Harvard. Allie\u2019s father also went to Harvard and her great-grandfather was a president of the university, so expectations all round are that Allie will continue the legacy.<\/p>\n Again, a complex family dynamic. But one with which Allie more or less knows how to deal. As long as school is good, life is good. And that\u2019s how Octavia throws a wrench into Allie\u2019s world; she\u2019s the bad girl who has been banished to the all-girls school, and she has the attitude to prove it.<\/p>\n One of Allie\u2019s main sources of pride is being \u201cthe first 10th grader in ABC history to make captain of the debate team.\u201d When Octavia tries out for the team at the behest of the school\u2019s new guidance counselor, and makes it \u2013 showing a natural talent for debating \u2013 both Allie and Octavia must adjust. And, as the team gears up for a big competition, the girls must decide the person they want to be, whether or not that person meets their, or anyone else\u2019s, expectations. The tension leading up to the debate is palpable and the reading compelling.<\/p>\n The cast of characters in Good Girls<\/em> is diverse, and Allie and Octavia are not the only ones facing challenges and trying to figure out who they are. We meet fellow students and get to know the guidance counselor and other teachers, as well. The storyline doesn\u2019t always go in the direction one expects, which is a great attribute for a novel. And, since it is a novel that is intended to be part of a series that will follow Allie, Octavia et al through their time at ABC, not everything gets resolved in this first instalment.<\/p>\n One of Inanna Publications\u2019 priorities is \u201cto publish literary books, in particular by fresh, new Canadian voices, that are intellectually rigorous, speak to women\u2019s hearts, and tell truths about the lives of the broad diversity of women \u2013 smart books for people who want to read and think about real women\u2019s lives.\u201d With Good Girls<\/em>, they have done just that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Expectations \u2013 our own and others\u2019 \u2013 can motivate us or constrain us. Two recently published novels feature strong (Jewish) women who must fight for their independence, battling not only parental, societal and other judgments, but their own self-conceptions. One book takes readers to the wilds of Arizona more than a century ago, the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[6133,3021,6385],"class_list":["post-22340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-fiction","tag-women","tag-young-adults"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"book](\"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/dec-16-books.16.Last-Woman-Standing-cover.jpg\")
The daughter of Prussian Jewish immigrants who eked out a living on her father\u2019s income as a baker, Josephine cannot bear to be contained by the strictures of society, her religion and her mother, whose story of coming to America is truly tragic. \u201cI loved my mother but wouldn\u2019t follow her down her path of righteousness and sorrow,\u201d says Josephine in The Last Woman Standing<\/em>. \u201cWe lived in a new world. She dwelled among old dybbuks.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"book](\"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/dec-16-books.16.Good-Girls-cover.jpg\")