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    The Tin Horse: A Novel
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    The Tin Horse: A Novel
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    The Tin Horse: A Novel
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Tin Horse: A Novel

    Written by Janice Steinberg

    Narrated by Kate McGregor-Stewart

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In the stunning tradition of Lisa See, Maeve Binchy, and Alice Hoffman, The Tin Horse is a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the immigrant experience.

    It has been more than sixty years since Elaine Greenstein's twin sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off contact with her family forever. Elaine has made peace with that loss. But while sifting through old papers as she prepares to move to Rancho Mañana-or the "Ranch of No Tomorrow" as she refers to the retirement community-she  is stunned to find a possible hint to Barbara's whereabouts all these years later. And it pushes her to confront the fierce love and bitter rivalry of their youth during the 1920s and '30s, in the Los Angeles Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

    Though raised together in Boyle Heights, where kosher delis and storefront signs in Yiddish lined the streets, Elaine and Barbara staked out very different personal territories. Elaine was thoughtful and studious, encouraged to dream of going to college, while Barbara was a bold rule-breaker whose hopes fastened on nearby Hollywood. In the fall of 1939, when the girls were eighteen, Barbara's recklessness took an alarming turn. Leaving only a cryptic note, she disappeared.

    In an unforgettable voice layered with humor and insight, Elaine delves into the past. She recalls growing up with her spirited family: her luftmensch of a grandfather, a former tinsmith with tales from the Old Country; her papa, who preaches the American Dream even as it eludes him; her mercurial mother, whose secret grief colors her moods-and of course audacious Barbara and their younger sisters, Audrey and Harriet. As Elaine looks back on the momentous events of history and on the personal dramas of the Greenstein clan, she must finally face the truth of her own childhood, and that of the twin sister she once knew.

    In The Tin Horse, Janice Steinberg exquisitely unfolds a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bonds between sisters, mothers, and daughters and the profound and surprising ways we are shaped by those we love. At its core, it is a book not only about the stories we tell but, more important, those we believe, especially the ones about our very selves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9780385359481
    Unavailable
    The Tin Horse: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Tin Horse

    3.5/5

    46 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Like any family worth its salt, this fictional family has secrets and dissension, love and hate and loyalties and betrayals. And like the best of fictional families, this one seemed very real to me.Elaine, one of the daughters in this close-knit family and now an old woman moving into a retirement community, reluctantly decides to try to find out what happened to a sibling decades after last seeing her. From early-Hitler Romania to modern-day Los Angeles, the Jewish family has quite a story to tell but it happens in bits and pieces, jumping back and forth in time, and it's done very well.The story is much like other immigrant stories, desperation and survival, sometimes triumph, but this one is beautifully written without being flowery, and I love the way it circles around on itself. Relationships are real and flawed. Decisions are not always wise. Some of the loose ends are tied up in the end, but not as just a neat, happy package. It's messy and contradictory and altogether believable. As a fan of well-written sagas, I very much enjoyed this one.I was given an advance reader's copy of the book for review.
    • 4/5
      The Tin HorsebyJanice SteinbergMy "in a nutshell" summary...Downsizing and old memories lead to past hidden revelations.My thoughts after reading this book...My thoughts sort of rambled as I read the final pages of this book. It was truly a book of family stories. It was the stories of a Jewish family living in Southern California in the early twenties...actually...it was a present day story, too. As Elaine preps her house for her move to a retirement community...papers and letters and photos bring to mind her life as a child growing up with her twin sister, Barbara. The stories that meander through her mind are of her parents, her Zayde...grandfather...her other sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, boyfriends, husbands and children...lol...just as I said earlier...a story of families. Probably the puzzle that still looms is the one that concerns Elaine's twin, Barbara. She left on her own when she was 18 and pretty much remains gone.What I loved about this book...I think I loved the complexity of this family's relationships. Things were not totally hidden but things were not always out in the open, either. I loved the significance of the tin horse...that was a lovely touch. What I did not love...I was not enamored with Barbara or Elaine. They were not appealing characters to me. Final thoughts...I appreciate this book but I did not love it. I enjoyed the stories but I was not emotionally caught up in them. I am not sorry that I read it because I liked the book but it did not really touch my heart the way some books do.
    • 3/5
      Not ready to rate or review...but, I would not compare it to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". That's a publishers blurb I'm sure. This book can stand on its own, but might not get read if they didn't use some gimmick to get folks to buy it.
    • 4/5
      Elaine Greenstein is archiving her life. In her mid-80s, the widowed, retired crusading lawyer is preparing to move to a retirement community and is cleaning out her house. She is assisted by Josh, a doctoral candidate at USC, who is helping identify material for an archive of her papers that the school is compiling.Elaine had forgotten about the department-store boxes of her mother's papers that she shoved in the back of a closet after her mother's death. These boxes set Elaine down a path of memory to her childhood in the old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, where a lively community of Jewish immigrants worked and went to school with Mexicans, Asians and others who'd come to Los Angeles to achieve their American dream.Elaine's childhood ended painfully when her free-spirited twin sister, Barbara, ran off and was never heard from again. One of the boxes seems to hold a clue to where Barbara might have gone, and Elaine––with Josh's eager assistance––feels compelled to take her one last chance to finding her sister.Janice Steinberg vividly portrays the bitter and sweet of working-class immigrant Jewish life in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not a world I've read about before and it was the strongest part of the book, in its descriptions of stores, streetcars (no need for a car in Los Angeles!), crafts work in early Hollywood, union organizing in the garment business, the rise of Zionism, the arrival of refugees from fascist and Nazi Europe, and dealing with American-style casual anti-Semitism as the Greensteins and their friends begin to go to school and work outside the neighborhood.In the stories told by Elaine's family, Steinberg also shows us the hardships and terrors of the old country that drove Elaine's ancestors to the new land. The book is a personal history too, of Elaine's whole extended family and of how you can love and hate your family, often at the same time. As with most stories about twins, an important part of the theme is the mixed feelings of guilt, resentment and excitement as the pair development their own, independent identities.While this is a story well told, with strong characters, I have a couple of problems with it. The flashback story of the teenage Elaine, Barbara and Danny, a boy they both dated, sometimes crosses the line into soap opera territory. Another part of the flashback story includes the fictional detective Philip Marlowe. Plopping a legendary fictional character down in the middle of this took me out of the story. In an author's note on the Amazon product page, Steinberg explains that the character of Elaine as a young woman was inspired by the young woman in the Los Angeles bookstore whom Philip Marlowe has a memorable encounter with in The Big Sleep. Well, alright, that's an explanation, but using Philip Marlowe in this book was too much of a clash of fictional realities for me.The problems I have with the story weren't serious enough to cause more than the loss of one star. For anyone interested in multi-generational family dramas or stories of the immigrant experience, this is a novel well worth reading.
    • 5/5
      First of all, I read this book because my grandparents lived in this area of California when my dad was a child; but by the time I came along they had long since moved. I recently found out about this bit of family history after my dad died. My dad, like one of the twins in this novel, never embraced his Jewishness, and like many refugees from Eastern Europe and other soviet blocked countries, his parents didn’t speak, at least around us, about the old country. I feel grateful that Janice Steinberg brought this time and place alive, and that I got so much more than a history lesson.It is the story of twins, Barbara and Elaine, growing up in the 1930’s in Boyle Heights California. Elaine, who is in her 80’s is getting ready to move into a retirement community, and as she downsizes, she comes across something that brings back memories of her sister Barbara, who had walked away from the family and disappeared right before America’s involvement in WWII. Elaine’s search for what had happened to Barbara makes this an emotionally charged 5 star mystery. Be advised that there are adult situations and some sexual content that would not be suitable for some readers.
    • 4/5
      Elaine Greenstein is archiving her life. In her mid-80s, the widowed, retired crusading lawyer is preparing to move to a retirement community and is cleaning out her house. She is assisted by Josh, a doctoral candidate at USC, who is helping identify material for an archive of her papers that the school is compiling.Elaine had forgotten about the department-store boxes of her mother's papers that she shoved in the back of a closet after her mother's death. These boxes set Elaine down a path of memory to her childhood in the old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, where a lively community of Jewish immigrants worked and went to school with Mexicans, Asians and others who'd come to Los Angeles to achieve their American dream.Elaine's childhood ended painfully when her free-spirited twin sister, Barbara, ran off and was never heard from again. One of the boxes seems to hold a clue to where Barbara might have gone, and Elaine––with Josh's eager assistance––feels compelled to take her one last chance to finding her sister.Janice Steinberg vividly portrays the bitter and sweet of working-class immigrant Jewish life in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not a world I've read about before and it was the strongest part of the book, in its descriptions of stores, streetcars (no need for a car in Los Angeles!), crafts work in early Hollywood, union organizing in the garment business, the rise of Zionism, the arrival of refugees from fascist and Nazi Europe, and dealing with American-style casual anti-Semitism as the Greensteins and their friends begin to go to school and work outside the neighborhood.In the stories told by Elaine's family, Steinberg also shows us the hardships and terrors of the old country that drove Elaine's ancestors to the new land. The book is a personal history too, of Elaine's whole extended family and of how you can love and hate your family, often at the same time. As with most stories about twins, an important part of the theme is the mixed feelings of guilt, resentment and excitement as the pair development their own, independent identities.While this is a story well told, with strong characters, I have a couple of problems with it. The flashback story of the teenage Elaine, Barbara and Danny, a boy they both dated, sometimes crosses the line into soap opera territory. Another part of the flashback story includes the fictional detective Philip Marlowe. Plopping a legendary fictional character down in the middle of this took me out of the story. In an author's note on the Amazon product page, Steinberg explains that the character of Elaine as a young woman was inspired by the young woman in the Los Angeles bookstore whom Philip Marlowe has a memorable encounter with in The Big Sleep. Well, alright, that's an explanation, but using Philip Marlowe in this book was too much of a clash of fictional realities for me.The problems I have with the story weren't serious enough to cause more than the loss of one star. For anyone interested in multi-generational family dramas or stories of the immigrant experience, this is a novel well worth reading.
    • 5/5
      I know this book is a novel, but I kept wanting to check out some of the names on search engines because the characters and situations seemed so real.THE TIN HORSE is actually more than one story. Elaine Greenstein, a lawyer who specialized in human rights issues, was born in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles suburb, in 1921, seventeen minutes after her twin sister, Barbara. They grew up in a Jewish environment where many of their neighbors and some of their relatives were new immigrants from Europe. When the story opens, she is 85 years old and preparing to move to a senior retirement community. With the help of a young archivist, she is going through boxes that had been stored for decades. Some of them belonged to her mother, acquired but not opened after her mother’s death. Among the papers is an item relating to Barbara. Barbara had disappeared, leaving a note saying she was leaving, when they were eighteen years old. The family advertised, used detectives, and other means to try to locate her, all without results.When Elaine finds a card from a detective with a strange name on the back, she decides to try to find out what happened to her sister. THE TIN HORSE switches between the story of Elaine’s growing up years, her move, and the current hunt for Barbara.Since most readers will assume that she finds the answer to her search, I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I add that she does find out about Barbara. Learning the reason Barbara left and her reasons for making no contact over the decades raises some interesting questions about what people do to reinvent themselves and why they do it.I found the story compelling and engrossing. I felt I was there.
    • 5/5
      This book brought to life an immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles from the early 1900's. It's full of rich characters living their lives, with real conflicts and triumphs. It kept me engaged throughout. Wonderful!!
    • 3/5
      I love the theme behind this and the moral of the story. You can always be who you want to be if you step up and take the reins. Personally, I like a fast paced book, always on the move, always something happening. This had a very slow pace, lots of background information and details. I found the last 40 pages the most interesting. You find out things you knew where going to happen, but still you felt like you needed them confirmed. This book would be perfect for my friends that like a slow pace and lots of everyday details.
    • 4/5
       "They say - and I guess this proves it - that every sibling grows up in a different family.  A captivating story, with all the aches and pains of growing up. From page one I was immersed in the book, by the last page I felt as if I lived it. Part family history, part mystery with a touch of sardonic humor and the joys (or not) of family bonds.