Sima's Undergarments for Women

There's a kind of random story about Sima's Undergarments for Women. For years, I'd been hearing about how great our library's biggest fundraiser each year, the library book fair, is. If you get there early, there are great books available at reasonable prices. If you go later into the book fair,  you can fill a bag with books for just $5. I'm really a library kind of person so I was torn. Did I really want to buy any books? Did I want to support the library? Wanting to support the library won out. I showed up with bag and browsed the mostly picked off selections. I didn't find any books that I really wanted to read, imagining those got scooped up the first day. However, I found a few books that I wouldn't mind reading and then kept on browsing in an attempt to fill my bag. I'm not sure what attracted me to Sima's Undergarments for Women. Not a book I'd ever heard of. I was unfamiliar with the author. I must have scanned the back of the book and read the blurb, saw that it took place in Brooklyn, my hometown, and took it home. Now, remember that I live in rural central Florida. Kind of random that this book was at our library book fair.

The bag of books sat around for almost a year! Then, the photography prompt for one of my daily photo groups on Facebook was books or stack or something like that. I headed towards the book fair bag. (This is when I picked up Letters for Emily, part of this same book fair haul. I also took out The Violin of Auschwitz and Sima's Undergarments for Women.) I read Letters for Emily and The Violin of Auschwitz almost immediately. But for some reason, Sima just sat on the table in the family. And sat. And sat. Until the other day.

I added Sima to my goodreads that night. The next morning, I got a message from a Brooklyn friend of mine. Did I realize that the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross, was a graduate of the same high school that I graduated from? Nope. I had no idea. Then I wondered, will this make me enjoy the novel more? Since my mother identified so much with our high school (she graduated from the same high school, too), if anything, it made me think of my mom. And that's always good.

Sima is a 60-something secular Jew living in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where she'd grown up. She runs a lingerie store out of her basement (which is a thing in Borough Park). In walks Timna, a beautiful Israeli, who just happens to need a job that Sima happens to have open. Once Timna is in Sima's life, it really stirs up memories of when Sima first found out that she and her husband, Lev, weren't going to have children and all the feelings associated with that.

I don't often read novels about 60-somethings in Brooklyn so I felt the connection. I enjoyed Stanger-Ross' writing style and enjoyed the book.