Unmentionables Paperback - 2014

From the rear cover

"Unmentionables is a love story and a journey of self-discovery."
--Historical Novel Society

"Loewenstein isn't afraid to let her characters develop a little more deeply than you'd expect."
--Spacebeer

"This is a period that begs for great sweeping novels and I was especially happy to lose myself in the lives of these interesting people...This is how we live, after all, with so much big and small going on around us."
--Chasing Ray

"Laurie Loewenstein's Unmentionables is the best work of historical fiction I have read in the past few years."
--Bookworlder

"Characters open the story in opposition to each other and sometimes themselves, and the forces they encounter produce alterations along the way, and new characters result. This is the stuff of excellent fiction, and Unmentionables is excellent."
--Redroom.com

"I felt enriched by the book. Definitely worth a look!"
--Not the New York Times Book Review

"Laurie Loewenstein has written a simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting insight into our world as it was a century ago."
--Carnegie-Stout Public Library

"Laurie Loewenstein brings the reader into the past, to Chautauqua assemblies, World War I France, and Midwestern small-town life. But like all good historical fiction, Unmentionables uses the past as a way to illuminate large, pertinent questions--of race and gender, of love and death, of action and consequence. Meticulously researched and exquisitely written, Unmentionables is a memorable debut."
--Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer

"Laurie Loewenstein's Unmentionables, a story of prejudice, struggle, and redemption, is compulsively readable and immensely seductive. Buffeted by the immense societal changes surrounding World War I, Loewenstein's characters--deftly drawn and as familiar to the reader as friends from childhood--fight for love, equality, and ultimately justice in a world awash in the volatile cusp of change. At once intimate and wide-ranging, Unmentionables illuminates both the triumph and cost of sacrifice, along with its hard-won rewards."
--Robin Oliveira, author of My Name Is Mary Sutter

"I loved this beautiful book, set amid the cornfields and treelined streets of a quiet Illinois farm town during the First World War. Loewenstein's ability to create a moment in history is authoritative and accurate. I was lost in that world, believed every word of it, and loved and wept with the delicately drawn characters. Love, fear, shame, regret, hope, and independence intertwine as the story moves from farm country to war-torn France and big-city Chicago, replete with anarchists and artists, suffragettes, freethinkers, and the working poor. This is a perfect book club pick, dealing with real history, real issues that are still relevant today, and real and unforgettable characters."
--Taylor M. Polites, author of The Rebel Wife

"Laurie Loewenstein's Unmentionables transports the reader to a time not that long ago--when women were not allowed to vote and racial prejudice was commonplace--when so much was different, but human nature was so much the same. Treating us to a captivating narrative that illuminates as it entertains, Loewenstein reminds us that it is the courage and integrity of individual people that changes the world."
--Beverly Donofrio, author of Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace

Media reviews

Citations

• Kirkus Reviews, 10/15/2013, Page 0
• Library Journal, 01/01/2014, Page 100
• Publishers Weekly, 09/30/2013, Page 0