Nevertheless, thanks to Isaacs’s graceful touch, the quality of the story is never jeopardized. This turn of event shifts the novel’s pace, turning the last pages into a race between good guys and bad. As things progress, he’s in imminent danger from the various nut- cases he’s informing on. Lo and behold, that handsome piece of America is our very own Charlie Blair, undercover.
Unfortunately, he’s a new convert to Wrath, the anti-Semitic group she’s in Jackson Hole to cover. When the plot returns to present-day Wyoming, Lauren spots the man of her dreams.
The split family tree, with one branch entering a -traditional- American frontier life, and the other remaining Jewish and New Yorkish, offers a fascinating example of the subtle changes undertaken for assimilation’s sake (not to mention for the purposes of Isaacs’s storytelling). She prudently accepted, later bearing Jacob, who-ll become Jake Blair when he makes it to Wyoming, and Ruthie, great-grandmother to Lauren. What or who was their missing link? On sighting the Statue of Liberty, one Herschel Blaustein proposed to little Dora Schottland (already a couple of months pregnant, thanks to a dashing cad). Opening with a description of all-American Charlie Blair, a Wyoming FBI agent on the trail of a local militia group, and then jumping to the life of Lauren Miller, a New York reporter for the Jewish News who’s uncovering the latest in anti-Semitic bombings, the narrative unexpectedly mingles their lives: unbeknownst to all, they share a great-great-grandmother and the thread of a representative tale-the struggle to become American. With keen humor and fine characterizations, the bestselling Isaacs’s (Lily White, 1996, etc.) multigenerational saga explores the nature of American identity.
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