The Two-Family House

The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

5 Stars. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this debut novel by Lynda Cohen Loigman from NetGallery.
It started off quite slowly and I thought I wouldn’t like it, but just when you think it’s not going to get better it hits you rather quickly and early on in the book. I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it.
Mort and Abe are two brothers who own a company together and they live together with their families on different floors of the same house. Abe is a fun loving family man with a social magnetism and Mort is a distant father with a fondness for numbers over emotions. Their wives, Rose and Helen, who discover they are pregnant at the same time at the beginning of the novel. For Rose this will be her fourth child, and Helen’s fifth. Helen and Rose are close friends until the night they both give birth to their youngest children. Helen wants a daughter so desperately after giving birth to four boys and Rose, who has three daughters wants to give her husband Mort a son that he desperately wants.
While the husbands are out of town for business, both women go into labor during a blizzard with no doctor able to come to the house and no way to reach the hospital, they do have a midwife come to the house to help with the delivery. At the time neither women realizes there lives are going to change.
The characters evolve beautifully in this rich, complex story. With the story spanning over several decades we see a lot of changes in these families. All families have secrets and how hard it is to keep the skeletons in the closets, so others don’t see them. One of the things I liked about this book was that it brought the family closer to life. There is betrayal, bitterness, jealousies, tragedy, loss, test of faith, heartbreak, and choices made not necessarily for the good, but some are good, some come with consequent, all the feelings and emotions that normal families go through.
This is a memorable book to read, and everyone can relate to what happens to this family in the span of the decades that it covers. I did find myself engrossed in this family’s life; by the way the author developed the characters, with each of them telling their story. This is a good read for those that enjoy fiction.


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