The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor

The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor- 368 pages

ARC from author

Book Blurb:

On June 19, 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. The day Ethel was first arrested in 1950, she left her two young sons with a neighbor, and she never came home to them again. Brilliantly melding fact and fiction, Jillian Cantor re-imagines the life of that neighbor, and the life of Ethel and Julius, an ordinary-seeming Jewish couple who became the only Americans put to death for spying during the Cold War.
A few years earlier, in 1947, Millie Stein moves with her husband, Ed, and their toddler son, David, into an apartment on the eleventh floor in Knickerbocker Village on New York’s Lower East Side. Her new neighbors are the Rosenbergs. Struggling to care for David, who doesn’t speak, and isolated from other “normal” families, Millie meets Jake, a psychologist who says he can help David, and befriends Ethel, also a young mother. Millie and Ethel’s lives as friends, wives, mothers, and neighbors entwine, even as chaos begins to swirl around the Rosenbergs and the FBI closes in. Millie begins to question her own husband’s political loyalty and her marriage, and whether she can trust Jake and the deep connection they have forged as they secretly work with David. Caught between these two men, both of whom have their own agendas, and desperate to help her friends, Millie will find herself drawn into the dramatic course of history.

My Review: 4 stars

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Jillian Cantor, author of The Hours Count, is a natural born storyteller. Her previous book, Margot, is one of my favorites so I was thrilled when she sent me her newest work!

I felt like a total egghead while reading this because I must have slept through my American History class in high school. I remember learning about the threat of communism, the spies such as the Rosenbergs, the Russian’t threat and the “bomb”, but somehow I missed that the Rosenbergs were executed for spying. With that said, I learned a lot while reading this book.

Using the fictional neighbor, Millie, to tell this story in the first person point of view, the reader became very engrossed in her solitary life, her wonderful son and cantankerous husband. It was through her eyes that we met and then questioned the motives of both the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the therapist and just about anyone of Russian descent.

This is a fast and good read, based on a time in our history that is often not written about in contemporary fiction.

Quotes I liked:

I thought of the last time I was here, of the magical pill the nurse spoke of and how in a world where such a thing as the atomic bomb existed there should also be such a thing as a magical pill for a woman to prevent a baby.”

– “Life was normal and then suddenly it wasn’t.”

-“What surprises me most is the way the days sometimes feel so long and yet the years so short.”