*Sometimes to be who you really are, you have
to pretend you're already who you want to be.
*At two, Delores's mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake, trusting instinct would teach her daughter to swim. From then on, the water is where Delores Walker feels most at home. Now, nearly seventeen, she's boarding a Greyhound bus leaving the Bronx for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, a tacky roadside attraction in the shadow of Walt Disney's new Florida phenomenon.
With a hundred silver dollars left behind by her runaway dad, Delores is chasing her dream of being a mermaid with a group of other aquatic hopefuls - girls just as awkward and uncertain out of water as they are beautiful and graceful in it. And in this make-believe world of sequined tails and amphibious fantasy, Delores will learn some very real lessons about growing up and surviving in a world where everyone sometimes feels like a fish out of water.
A heartfelt novel of coming-of-age no matter what age you are, populated with characters offbeat, outcast, and thoroughly lovable, Swim to Me is filled with the kind of wise magic that'll have you believing in the impossible before the final page.

Here’s a memorable tale of two unlikely heroes: the lively, beautiful Flora and her husband, the brooding, studious Simon, two immigrants, both sent to America by their families to find a better life. An improbable match, they meet in New York City and fall in love. Simon—inventor of the jigsaw puzzle—eventually makes his fortune. Now wealthy, Flora and Simon become obsessed with rescuing those they left behind in Europe, loved ones whose fates will be determined by growing anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Puzzle King explores a fascinating moment in history with a cast of characters who endure with dignity, grace, and hope for the future.

From Publishers Weekly

Carter (Swim to Me) mines her family history in this underwhelming novel that examines the lives and loves of Jewish immigrants in early 20th-century New York. Nine-year-old Simon Phelps is sent by his mother from Lithuania to America, where he grows up poor but ambitious on the Lower East Side. He meets German-born Flora Grossman, and their marriage and ascent into American success forms the linchpin for the familiar tales of immigrants vacillating between the New World and the Old. The interwoven stories of Flora and her sisters—Seema, the kept mistress of a WASP banker, and the somber Margot, who endures an austere life in post-WWI Germany—highlight the different paths for German-Jewish women. Meanwhile, Simon's booming career in the advertising world is tempered by the grief he feels as he searches for his lost family, though his success enables him to plan a bold mission of salvation. Unfortunately, the narrative, while admirable in scope, feels too beholden to its source material, with the remote, speculative tone making this often feel more like a historian's work than a novelist's. (Aug.)
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Review

"Everybody loves an inspiring rags-to-riches story, and The Puzzle King delivers that in spades . . . [it tells] the immigrant story from a uniquely relationship-and family-based perspective, all the while honoring their bravery and stoicism in the face of great odds.” --San Francisco Book Review
(San Francisco Book Review )
“Skillfully using ties to her own family, Carter weaves a compelling story and  a rich, multilayered novel around three Jewish sisters and deftly captures the squalor and bustle of early 20th century New York . . . A fine novel with twists and turns and pieces that interlock tightly . . . Carter at her best.” --The Miami Herald
(The Miami Herald )

• *Carbondale, Illinois. 1958. For widowed Tessie Lockhart, booking two seats on a passenger train to Florida symbolizes a fresh start, far from her memories of love and loss. For Tessie’s teenage daughter Dinah, who misses her father terribly, the move to Gainesville means a new school and the painful ordeal of making new friends. Rich, popular Crystal Landy is one of the first girls Dinah meets—and it will be Crystal, along with her exquisite mother, Victoria, who will transform the Lockharts’ lives in ways they never could have imagined. For as war and change come to this small southern town, the bonds between mothers and daughters will be tested, friendships sealed, secrets revealed, and relationships forever altered by the turbulence of the coming decades.
  

Wise, moving, and warmly funny, The Orange Blossom Special, spans twenty years in the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters. Betsy Carter has crafted a powerful, richly rewarding novel about growing up, moving on, and turning strangers into friends.

From Publishers Weekly

The title of Carter's sympathetic if somewhat contrived debut novel (she's the author of a memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On) refers to the first New York–to–Miami passenger train, a not-so-subtle metaphor for the American dream and the forward march of history, as the story hurtles from the late '50s and into the '80s. In 1958, comely widow Tessie Lockhart and her seventh-grade daughter, Dinah, uproot from Carbondale, Ill., to Gainesville, Fla., driven by a very American faith in the healing power of a fresh start. There, their lives intertwine with those of Gainesville's powerful Landy family, as Dinah's popular classmate Crystal Landy and her solemn older brother, Charlie, befriend Dinah. When the Landys' house burns down, killing their father, Dinah and Crystal form a special bond, speaking "the same language of loss" across the divide of class and social status. Even Tessie and supercilious matriarch Victoria Landy cement a rocky friendship, and over the years, a tumultuous love blossoms between Dinah and Charlie. Carter's plot skips lightly over the passing decades, which are marked by periodic eruptions of changing culture. Each incident of racial strife or Vietnam tragedy feels forced and representative, though, and as the novel barrels into the late–20th century like the titular locomotive, Carter sacrifices character development in her reach for historical import.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Justly praised for her candid, humorous memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On (2002), magazine writer and editor Carter tries her hand at fiction in this affecting tale of widow Tess and her daughter, Dinah, who relocate to Gainesville, Florida, in 1958. They are soon virtually adopted by the wealthy Landy family, which includes pampered mom Victoria; teenager Charlie, who has the gift of second sight; and overweight, sassy seventh-grader Crystal. As the Landys help to ease their transition into southern small-town culture, Tess lands a good job and finds love with a jai alai mogul, and Dinah finds her soul mate in Charlie. Over the next two decades, they must all confront the changes brought on by Victoria's new business venture and Crystal's distress over Dinah and Charlie's relationship. The plot of this first novel seems overly thin at times, and the transitions between decades are sometimes too abrupt; yet there's no denying that the characters, drawn with fresh, often idiosyncratic detail, are instantly engaging. A light, funny read that also offers a distinctive sense of place. Joanne Wilkinson
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