![]() Although she engages in deception to do so, she becomes a female diver and a working, unwed mother at a time when there is no prototype for either identity. Conscious of these expectations, she seeks to hide or smooth over her transgressions. She sets her own standards of behavior at a time when women, although they take on the public-facing roles the men left behind, are still subject to social expectations and patriarchal scrutiny. Adaptability is her primary character trait it remains so throughout her life.Īs Anna develops, she changes from a young girl who idolizes her father to a young woman who learns self-sufficiency. By the time she is 12, she learns to adjust her speech and mannerisms to the present company, and her father has the sense that she is “a scrap, a weed that would thrive anywhere, survive anything” (23). Manhattan Beach is a heavily plotted, historical novel with a spunky heroine, a shipwrecked father, a gangster lover, and lots of well-researched period detail. Anna grows up straddling the feminine, domestic worlds of her mother and sister and the secretive external world of her father, whom she accompanies on his underworld missions. ![]()
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