Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: A Heartbreaking Brooklyn Love Triangle and a Mother's Impossible Choice

Care to take an early spring ramble through a neighborhood of Brooklyn brownstones? Crossing Brooklyn Ferry opens languidly, as if a camera held in the distance panned slowly along the tree-lined street of Zoe Finnery's new neighborhood, where she's moved with her husband and 6-year-old daughter. A working-class gal and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Zoe has already transformed her life by marrying into wealth. But husband Jamie has slipped into a paralyzing depression, and perhaps this new move--from Manhattan affluence to Brooklyn blue-collar--sets into motion a case of romantic love to which Zoe hesitatantly succumbs. Her lover lives next door, is virile (this is a blue-collar neighborhood, after all), and reads good books by the likes of Jane Austen, Richard Russo, Thackeray, and Alison Lurie.

In this second novel, Jennie Fields explores through different configurations the sexual themes established in her first novel, Lily Beach. But where the first dwelled in darkness (a woman's compulsive sexuality as pain medication), Crossing Brooklyn Ferry posits the lighter side of lust--transformation through romantic love.