Becoming Herself

by Maureen Reid

Summary:

What if … you were told you won’t be accepted because you don’t sound like everyone else… you want more choices than your world offers… you love a man you can never have … you need to reconnect with the land you left behind? That is Margaret’s story. Becoming Herself is the tale of a woman’s road to self-discovery in the first half of the 20th century. It is as current as today’s headlines.

On her first day in America, seven-year old Maggie Clancy is placed in an orphanage by her grieving widowed father. She is told that from now on she will be called Margaret. Maggie will no longer exist. She will have to forge her own path in this new world of upstate New York. Her lovely singing voice provides her the needed entry.

In an era when she loses the corset and gains the right to vote, Margaret struggles with balancing the roles of wife and mother with her longing to do even more with her life. She’s a witness to the prejudices experienced by Irish immigrants and to Americans questioning the patriotism of their German-Americans neighbors during WWI. Despite that, she hopes and believes that man’s inhumanity to man will lessen when women make their voices heard.

Margaret embraces the changes and challenges of a world that’s experiencing airplanes in the skies, radios in the parlor and women beginning to assert their independence inside and outside the home. Margaret yearns to find the Maggie who’s been lost by returning to Ireland, the land of her birth.

In Becoming Herself, Margaret shares her dreams, conflicts, and never- to- be-told secrets. It is the story of a woman searching to become all she is capable of being.

Review:

This book was a heartbreaking tale of the struggle women went through to receive the rights that they should have had from the beginning. This story is raw and holds nothing back. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, and felt a hundred different emotions throughout this book.

I went back and forth on how I felt about the main character. She claims to love God and want to do what is right, however, ends up having an affair and really kind of spits on the whole idea of religion. She was treated despicably by her husband. He did not support anything she wanted to do, and he was verbally and at least one time physically abusive. But in no way does that excuse what she ended up doing. She should have just left him. So while I can’t say she did everything right .. this is just the story of what one woman went through during this time and her life during.

It was extremely emotional, and a very good read. The ending just about did me in and I have not been able to stop thinking about this story.

 

Becoming Herself by the award winning author Maureen Reid Published March 2019Red Penguin Books Available in paperback,  Kindle and hardcover at Amazon,Target, Barnes and Noble or link in my bio.Book Tour by @bookandwinelovers

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