Family identity comes from a shared collection of origin stories: how parents got together, how fortunes were made or lost, why allegiances were made or ties broken. In The Tin Horse, Janice Steinberg spins a decades-spanning drama of familial discovery that examines the seismic shifts in self-understanding when the underlying legends of a family prove unreliable.
Retired activist lawyer Elaine Greenstein is packing to move to a senior community. When she runs across an intriguing clue to the whereabouts of her long-lost twin sister, she is swept back in reverie to her prewar Los Angeles childhood in the historical Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. As Elaine recounts the family legends--a dangerous love for a Christian in a time of pogroms, a young girl who walked across Romania to emigrate, an entrepreneurial egg ranch in California--she also remembers the pain of learning some of those family-defining stories were less than accurate. As she gets closer to finding her sister, it becomes clear that, even at this late age, she must once again challenge herself to face the inconsistencies in family lore if she wishes to come to terms with the truth of her sister's disappearance.
Though the present-day scenes are compelling, Steinberg's writing really blossoms in her re-creation of the Boyle Heights of Elaine's youth. And though Steinberg is a mystery writer, here the "mystery" is merely a tool to uncover a sometimes painful wisdom: Families often build their identities on cherished stories of questionable veracity. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic