Send for Me
A Novel (A Read with Jenna Pick)
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3.8 • 335 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An achingly beautiful work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin, unspooling a thread of love, longing, and the powerful bonds of family. • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!
Based on the author’s own family letters, Send for Me tells the story of Annelise, a young woman in prewar Germany. Growing up working at her parents’ popular bakery, she's always imagined a future full of delicious possibilities. Despite rumors that anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise, Annelise and her parents can’t quite believe that it will affect them; they’re hardly religious. But as she falls in love, marries, and gives birth to her daughter, the dangers grow closer. Soon Annelise and her husband are given the chance to leave for America, but they must go without her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain.
Two generations later in a small Midwestern city, Annelise’s granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman newly in love. But when she stumbles upon a trove of the letters her great-grandmother wrote from Germany after Annelise's departure, she sees the history of her family’s sacrifices in a new light, leading her to question whether she can still honor the past while planning for her future.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Lauren Fox’s multigenerational historical drama offers up a poignant slice of 20th-century history. In the early 1930s, young Annelise works behind the counter of her Jewish family’s bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, and dreams about the future. Decades later in America, her granddaughter Clare discovers the hopeful young woman’s letters, giving her an up-close look into the hopes and fears that prompted Annelise’s family to flee Europe when the Nazis came to power. With its intimate tone and painstaking period details, this powerful story makes major world events like World War II and the Holocaust feel deeply personal. Both of the book’s thoughtful heroines navigate their own times with quiet bravery. Send for Me is an inspiring tearjerker that reminds us history doesn’t live solely in the past—we carry a piece of it in our hearts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fox (Days of Awe) draws on old family letters for a poignant fictional memoir of her Jewish grandparents, who left Germany in 1938 with her mother and settled in Milwaukee. Annelise, the daughter of bakery owners in Feldenheim, Germany, is struggling with her own adolescence against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism. In her early 20s, she finds true love with Walter Goldmann, a regular at the bakery, newly divorced and 10 years older. In the midst of increasingly vicious anti-Semetic cruelty Annelise miscarries after a brick is thrown through their window the couple has a child, Ruth, born in 1937, and seek asylum in America. Fox then intercuts scenes of the couple's new life in the Midwest with flashbacks of more horrors in Germany. A brief scene after Annelise's death at 85 has Ruth cleaning out her apartment with the help of Ruth's daughter, Clare, who finds a cache of letters to Annelise from her mother, which make a deep impact on both women. Fox satisfyingly brings this story of love and desire full circle, as Clare and Ruth reflect on what it means to be both a mother and a child in the darkest of times. This tender and deeply inspired story will move readers.
