TGIF! I hope all in the path of Hurricane Florence are safe and sound. Thinking of you all!

Today my first lines are from a book I am currently reading:

1905

For the rest of her life, Bella Rabishevsky would remember the day the K’hal Jeshurun temple burned as the day she lost her son. She stood over the coal stove that day in the cramped third-floor apartment on Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that she, her husband, and her six children shared. The heat wafting from the steaming pot, combined with the sweltering August temperature outside, was almost too much to bear.

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Synopsis from Goodreads:

Morris, Sol, and Harry Rabinowitz grew up poor but happy in a tiny flat on the Lower East Side, until the death of their father thrust them into having to fend for themselves and support their large family. Morris apprenticed himself at twelve years old to a garment cutter in a clothing factory; Sol headed to college and became an accountant; and Harry, the youngest, fell in with a gang as a teenager and can’t escape. Morris steadily climbs through the ranks at the factory until he’s running the place and buys out the owner, and Sol comes to work with him. But Harry can’t be lured away from the glamour, the power, and the money that comes from working for mobster Louis Buchalter, an old bully from the neighborhood. And when Louis sets his sights on the unions that staff the garment makers’ factories, a fatal showdown is inevitable, and puts brother against brother.

This new novel is equal parts historical thriller, rich with the detail of a vibrant New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, and family saga, based in part on Andrew Gross’s family history, and will cement his reputation as today’s most atmospheric and original historical thriller writer.

Please share with me the first line(s) of the book you are currently reading! I would love to read it! Have you read The Button Man, or do you plan to? Happy Friday reading! ~ Jennifer THR