Reviewer Mary Lignor: Mary is a retired librarian, originally from Connecticut but now living in New Mexico. All her life Mary has loved books and has passed this love on to her daughters. Mary started working in a library when her children were young as an Assistant Librarian and ended up as its Director. Her favorite books are suspense, political intrigue and anything involving the World War II era.
Title:
The Money God
Author: Zena Livingston
ISBN:
978-1-84386-518-6
Click Here To Purchase The Money God
A story of very damaged relationships
between mothers and daughters starting in the 30's in the Catskill
Mountains of upstate New York and ending during the 60's in New York
City.
Celia is born to a family who run a small farm and
hotel in the Catskills in the 1930's. Her mother and father
came from Russian Jewish immigrants who came to America to give their
families a better life. The mother, Sophie, is a very
domineering type that runs the family including a father, Ruben, and
two sons, Sam and Abe along with Celia, with an iron fist.
Celia marries Henry, who also works at the hotel as a manager.
Their marriage is a happy one that is blessed with a daughter,
Estelle. Sadly, Henry is diagnosed with TB and Ruben passes
away within a short time after Henry's bad news. The family
goes on but the economy is failing and the hotel is not making a
profit. Sophie decides to sell the farm and move to the city to
be near her family. She arranges a marriage for Celia, saying
that she will not take care of her and her child and she needs to go
on with her life with a new husband. Celia meets Morris who
owns a clothing factory in New York. Morris lost his first wife
during childbirth and has two sons. One son is the same age as
Estelle and they get along well and the other is slightly retarded
and has to be enrolled in a special school. Celia tries to keep
the families together and does a fairly good job. She misses
the love of her life Henry, but is faithful to Morris, except for an
assignation which, by the way, could have been left out of this saga
completely. During all this time the war in Europe was warming
up and friends and family were going off to France to fight.
This included Morris' oldest son who joined the Air Force. The
story jumps ahead to Estelle's relationship with her mother and also
Ann. Ann is born to Celia and Morris later in life and she is
blamed for things that she had no part in and becomes her father's
favorite. Celia is always upset because she is not getting the
attention that she craves from everybody. All this attention is
going to Ann. Morris passes away and Celia marries another
Morris, who is well off financially, but doesn't like Celia's
daughter, Ann. And so the bad feelings and jealousy go on and
on until the end.
The Money God is supposedly a family
saga but, I have to admit that if I were part of this family I would
probably run away. It doesn't seem to me that Celia was all
that fond of having a lot of money. She just wanted enough to
live well but, she didn't seem to crave only money. She also
wanted to be loved and cared for but, didn't know quite how to go
about it and made a lot of mistakes along the way. But, that's
only my opinion. Sophie was definitely not a nice person and
she passed her feelings along to Celia even though they did not get
along. Estelle started out OK but her husband was wounded in
World War II and they didn't get along all that well and had a
marriage in name only. The only one who seemed to come out of
this disfunctional family moderately unscathed was Ann and she had a
very hard time at first.
I was anxious to read this
because I love family sagas and always look forward to seeing how
these people got through their lives given all the adversity that
usually comes with books of this type. But, this family didn't
like each other at all and showed it. I'm sure that there are
people in the reading public that would enjoy this book and I wish
Ms. Livingston well but, it just wasn't for me.