Not Our Kind

I first read about the Kitty Zeldis historical fiction novel, Not Our Kind, through an email from the Jewish Book Council. I got on that mailing list to get suggestions for books to read with my synagogue book club. Then it showed up in a list of Jewish fiction in Renee's Reading Club, a group I belong to on Facebook. Before I took it out of the library, I checked reviews on goodreads. The first review I read described this as a book about the post-WWII years in Brooklyn, NY.

Certainly not the book's fault, but the setting is Manhattan and NOT Brooklyn. That wouldn't matter to most people, but I thought I could get some insight into what my mom's teenage years growing up in Brooklyn might have been like. (As an aside, there was a little something that irked me while reading the book. Patricia is taking a taxi home from the west side of Manhattan and the author says she's traveling uptown when in actuality she's traveling crosstown. I'm sort of annoying that way.)

This book starts out when Eleanor has quit her job as a teacher in an elite private school. She's been dumped by her love interest, a fellow teacher, and she's had an altercation with a student. She's in a taxi heading towards an interview when her taxi is in accident with another taxi. The passenger in the other is Patricia. Eleanor is a little bit banged up so Patricia takes her home with her. Eleanor meets Patricia's daughter, Margaux, and the two form an immediate connection. Margaux is a survivor of polio who has been educated at home since her recovery. She doesn't get along with her current tutor. To make a long story short, Protestant Patricia hires Jewish Eleanor to be Margaux's tutor in spite of the objections of her husband, Wynn.

Wynn isn't the only one who is unhappy about Eleanor's new job. Eleanor's mother, Irina, is equally displeased. She warns Eleanor that the Bellamys are "not our kind." This becomes more apparent when Eleanor accompanies the family to their summer home in Connecticut to continue tutoring Margaux. I expected there to be a little bit more of Eleanor feeling on the outside because of being Jewish. It was the premise of the story, but it wasn't the main part of the story. At least not to me.

The story really focuses on the changes that this fateful meeting set up for both Eleanor and Patricia.

I would have given this novel 3.5 stars on goodreads, but I rounded it up to 4 stars since it was a perfect book for me to be reading at this time. I loved watching the way that both Patricia and Eleanor grew as the novel progressed. I loved that in the end, Patricia's desire to set a good example for Margaux led her to act the way she did.

It was a quick easy read and while it wasn't earth-shattering, I enjoyed it a lot.