A review by glaseramy
Summit Avenue by Mary Sharratt

3.0

This is a story about a young girl who heads to the U.S. from Germany in the early 1910s. She joins a cousin in Minneapolis and works in the flour mills. She tries so hard to better herself by taking night classes to learn English, and eventually gets a job translating German texts for a professor's widow who wants to complete what her husband had started. This book is beautifully written, heartbreakingly sad, but yet ends with hope. Violet (the widow) lives on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, and there is a good sense of place, but there's another series of books that takes place in that area (although in 1949/1950) that I feel better captures the area and time. This was still a good book and beautifully written, but I wish there had been more of a sense of place.