Home Girl

I received a free review copy of Home Girl ages, and ages, and ages ago. While we were still in Florida. TW read it while we were still in Florida which caused much discussion of payday loan stores and beeper stores and high end shoe stores in Chicago and its suburbs. I believe the reason we are not living on Dempster in Evanston is directly related to a payday loan store, a beeper store and this particular book.

So thanks for that, Judith Matloff. (I can’t decide if I mean that thank you seriously or sarcastically. I often wished we lived over there… but am also often very glad that we do not.)

But, since Judith Matloff and her husband are obviously INSANE, I don’t think she cares one way or another whether I blame her for my current living location. I mean really. She must be insane. I don’t think the level of her insanity really hit me until she brought her baby home (oops, spoiler – sorry) to the muchachos… in all of the time they were renovating and dealing with the business, she never seemed to have second thoughts about living there with this potential child she was daydreaming about. That’s the only part of this story that troubled me.

They left Russia because they wanted to have a family – where there was anesthesia and she wasn’t putting her life or her kids’ life in danger – yet throughout all of that madness, she doesn’t mention having second thoughts due to the possible danger to the child she hoped to have. She mentions it later, 200 pages or so later. Weird.

The rest of the book… loved it. I was thrilled to read it. And thank goodness I did read it… it helped me realize that no matter how cool and interesting and fun I might THINK buying a rundown house in a depressed area of Chicago might be… it is so, so, so not something I really am cut out for.

I do wonder what happened to Clarence and Miguel, though.