13 women buy a $37,000 diamond necklace

The necklace : thirteen women and the experiment that transformed their lives

by Cheryl Jarvis. New York : Ballantine Books, 2008.

BookPage reviews: Overall, though, this is a feel-good and thought-provoking book that will challenge your assumptions about the value of luxury goods.

Kirkus: Why would diamonds, of all things, inspire this unusual openness? Does modern life have so few vehicles for sisterhood that shopping is the one thing we have left? Jarvis avoids wrestling with such ideas, preferring to fawn and overstate.As frivolous as its centerpiece.

Stalin terror

Montefiore, Simon. (2008). Sashenka. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kirkus: deft fiction debut: Inspired by a true story, historian Montefiore turns novelist to profile a young revolutionary who leads an exemplary Marxist life until a romantic misadventure puts her in Stalin's sights.Sashenka, teenage daughter of a Jewish oil magnate, is exiting an exclusive prep school for daughters of the Russian nobility in 1916 when, instead of being picked up by her father's chauffeur, she's arrested by the Tsarist police, who have gotten wind of her subversive activities as "Comrade Snowfox."

A short history of women

Book of the day on Book-a-Day calendar.

Five generations of willful, restless women struggle to find an identity beyond that of wife and mother.