Excerpt from The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

His pronouncement was made with hope and awe, braided with a bitterness that Augusta recognized as identical to her own.

* * *

Most days, immediately after school, both Augusta and Bess reported for work at their father's store. They navigated the crowds on the avenues—past the stores selling men's suits and women's hats; past the banks and the cobblers and the stationery shops; past the carcasses that hung like so many trophies in the kosher butcher's windows. Wherever they walked, the sidewalks were packed. The Sterns had moved to Brownsville from the Lower East Side immediately after Bess was born—a move made by those who were lucky enough to afford bigger homes, brighter light, and better air. But every year Brownsville grew shabbier and more crowded, more like the place they had left behind.

When the girls got to Stern's Pharmacy on the corner, with its window displays of bottles and brushes and its red-and-white Coca-Cola sign, they remembered their mother's repeated instructions to neaten their hair and smooth their skirts before stepping even one foot inside. "Once you go through that door," she used to say, "the customers will look to you. I want them to know that your father and I raised polite, intelligent, and well-groomed young ladies."

Excerpted from The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman. Copyright © 2024 by Lynda Cohen Loigman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.