Book summary: Almost Touching the Skies: Women's Coming of Age Stories


Almost Touching the Skies pays tribute to the diversity and vitality of American women writers through more than a century, and to the courage and resilience of young women through a compelling range of life experiences. Selected from the work of two dozen distinguished writers published by the Feminist Press, these stories explore the resonant theme of coming of age as a woman. How do girls and young women discover-or create-a sense of who they are and who they may become? How do they recognize what their lives have taught them and envision what their lives may someday be? How do they come to terms with what it means to be a woman in the world-and imagine how they may change the world as women?

Almost Touching the Skies offers an engaging, multicultural collection of fiction and memoir written between the 1870s and the 1990s. In the 1890s in New Orleans, the young heroine of a Kate Chopin story must choose between marriage to a handsome and wealthy suitor and a career as a concert pianist. Just after the turn of the century, in a dirt-poor black town in Florida, a spirited Zora Neale Hurston struggles to maintain her dreams after the death of her mother. In Depression-era Brooklyn, Edith Konecky's precociously witty character Allegra Maud Goldman contends with bourgeois Jewish parents who dote on her neurotic younger brother as they ignore or dismiss their daughter's yearnings. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, writing of her childhood in Malaysia, considers the mixed blessings bestowed on her by her schoolteacher nuns, while Marjorie Agosín, recalling her early years in Chile, pays tribute to the mysterious and fragrant world created by her family's cook, Carmencita. And Estella Conwill Májozo, calling up her memories of the "Little Africa" section of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, captures the moment she gets her first period during a stickball game with her five brothers, and is welcomed into womanhood by her family matriarchs.

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