Evergreen (The Blockbuster Best Seller Now a Spectacular NBC-TV Series by the author of the best-selling Crescent City.)

What fun! Belva Plain should be crowned the queen of the family saga. This sweeping novel of passion, love, life, sex, betrayal and survival in early twentieth-century America is the first of five books in the Werner family saga and tells the tale of Anna Friedman, from childhood to old age.

Anna has deep, passionate secrets she keeps from those she loves best, which affects so much of what she does and who she is. One of the reasons the novel is so riveting is that the story is told from the points of view of various characters, not just Anna. That makes for more interesting reading, in my opinion. This is definitely chick-lit at its best!

Note to Kindle readers: There are dozens and dozens and dozens of typos in this book, which are due, I believe, to how the ebook was scanned from the original text. I dutifully submitted to the store all the errors I found, so hopefully there will be a new edition issued.

This is a review of the Kindle version. Great story but marred by consistent errors. The contraction we'll is always spelled well. He'll is hell. Bother or bothered is always brother or brothered. Very distracting. I finally gave up.

Really enjoyed this novel spanning the life of a women born prior to WWI to a loving family only to lose her parents to cholera. At the age of 14 she bravely left her homeland to travel to America for a new life. Anti-Semitism touched her many times over the years, but she and her husband built a life, a family, and an empire.

My grandmother could have written this book! From babyhood, as her first grandchild, she regaled me with stories of the "old country", farming, and scraping through life, until she sailed for America at sixteen, to serve as a maid in a wealthy Jewish home. Stories of great uncles who died in the war, and one who finally made it to America after, plagued with nightmares from the atrocities of those horrible times. Oh how I miss her! Rereading this book has freshened my memories of her love and her tribulations and trials. Thank you!

To remember a lovely writer who has just passed away last week, it is only fair to write a review of her best novel; A friend told me about this book around the time it first came out. It has since evolved into more than one book. I was glad to hear that there is a continuation of the book to come out next year and I do look forward to it. It was also a mini series as well that I watched. With that said, here is the book. Anna is a woman who comes to America from Poland. She works for the Warner family, but marries a fellow ambitious immigrant, who gives her a comfortable life. the typical American pull yourself up by your bootstrap kind of story. It has been over 30 years but I have never forgotten this book even now. Sadly, I had thought Mrs Plain passed years ago because after a while, she fell out of the limelight. I was shocked and even more sad that she has only passed this past week.

I really loved this book. I still consider myself young (early thirties) and when a coworker brought me this book to read, I snickered a little inside. I let it lay on my dresser for about three weeks and for some reason just got the urge to read it. I am so glad I did! The story line alone would have been enough to keep me reading, but what really sealed the deal is all the history thrown in. I honestly learned so much from this book. It's a sad world that we live in that I learned more from a fiction novel than from high school and college history courses. I guess it's just that history is easier to stay awake when it's weaved into a moving story. For other readers my age, ones who've enjoyed Hunger Games, Twilight Series, and even Fifty Shades....I hope you'll take the time to read this story. I'm so glad that someone sent it my way!

I enjoyed reading the entire book. Often mentioned in the book was the fact that a baby or young child, or even a young adult resembled a parent or grandparent or even a great grandparent. Iris had four children, and yet, I do not think that it was ever revealed that any of her children had the slightest of resemblance to Paul Werner or any of his relatives.
I was also sorry that both Maury and his son, Eric had to die young. That was a disappointment for me. I also thought that Joseph should have lived a little longer. However, I liked the writer's styling and gives the book a rating of five stars.

Belva is my new fave rave! Evergreen is the first book in a series of four novels that deals with a family who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland. The lead character, Anna Friedman, although somewhat deceitful in her marriage, is a remarkable woman. There were many family secrets that were brought up in the novel and most were resolved in this first piece. It is my hope that as the saga continues, that the unresolved secrets will be dealt with. I've already purchased the next three novels and look forward to some additional great reads. Belva, I love you.

Guy De Rosa

Los Angeles,California

This is the second time to read this very informative book about the obstacles faced by the Jewish people around the world and even in our own great country of America. As with the blacks of America, many doors have been and still are closed to Jews...country club membership, suburban neighborhoods, and more.
Belva Plain was a great author who wrote about "her people." Each novel is a history lesson. She is now gone and those of us who relished reading her books will miss her writing skills, honesty and forthright efforts to educate us about bigotry and unfairness in every encounter faced by the underprivileged races of the world.

This book deals with Jews and the depression. Anna kept her adultery a secret and had a daughter with a man other than her husband--(Paul from the sequel, The Golden Cup). Paul knew about his daughter but the daughter never knew for sure, only suspected. Anna's husband suspected but his suspicions were never confirmed. He died not knowing.

Belva Plain's writing is very descriptive and it amazes me how much research she puts into her books. She is a marvelous historical fiction writer about family sagas in my opinion. This is the first in a sequence of three books. I liked this book very much.

Karen Zemek, author of "My Funny Dad, Harry"

Have you ever wanted to know about immigrants' lives in other countries? Then you should read Belva Plain's book Evergreen. It will help you to find out about those immigrants and their generations' lives in foreign lands. The book is about a girl named Anna Friedman, who immigrated to America only when she sixteen years old. Anna's parents died in her own country Poland. She had brothers who moved to Vienna. She longed to come to United States and have a good life there. She married to a man named Joseph Friedman and had a boy. Besides, she had relationship with another man Paul Werner. Evergreen has become American classic novel tells unforgettable family and an amazing woman. Readers should not miss to read this great novel. One reason I was interested in this book was because the situation of the main character is similar to my situation. I'm an immigrant too. At the beginning, I also was confused about whether I should come to America or not. I wanted to come here because I knew my life would be better than I stayed in my own country. However, I miss my relatives very much. I liked Anna Friedman, this main character. She was very strong woman, who always kept her hopes up no matter what happened. She never gave up her hopes. Anna was a great wife and modern mother too. She never required her husband for anything; instead, she insisted he do anything he wanted to do and considered him all the time. She knew how to touch her children well. They never had the chance to do wrong things and she always wanted them to be successful. People should read this book. As far as we know, Anna was a wonderful woman. Although, she was dishonest to her family when she had relationship with another man Paul Werner. After that, she got pregnant and the baby was girl. She didn't tell Joseph and her son the baby was Werner's. The reason was she did it by accident because Joseph asked her to go to Werner's house and borrow some money to buy a new house. Anna didn't like his idea because Werner still like her even though she was married now and also she didn't like to ask someone for help, but she didn't want Joseph to feel disappointed. So the accident happened that day when Anna came to Werner's house and Paul forced her to have sex with him. This is an epic novel and exposes the heart of an extraordinary woman, so I think people should read this book.

Evergreen (Werner Family Saga)

This book is a first time read for me and for this author. I am thoroughly enjoying the book, but I am disappointed in the editing of it. I am constantly running into various errors, e.g. the word "we'll" is spelled without an apostrophe every time it's used. There are phonetic words instead of the word that is intended. This won't keep me from reading the book, but it is an annoyance.

Belva Plain's best! The wonderfull life of a family's four generations, how inmigrants have to struggle, family problems, family love, family disfunctionalities, etc.
All the characters are very well created, and the dramas of life are as real as they could get.

Belva Plain's best! The wonderfull life of a family's four generations, how inmigrants have to struggle, family problems, family love, family disfunctionalities, etc.
All the characters are very well created, and the dramas of life are as real as they could get.

I struggled to get through this story. I wanted to like it as I love books of generational family struggles (a la The Thornbirds). However, this story left me a bit cold.

Some Spoilers Below:

Firstly, while there is some lovely imagery and insight into some of the characters, most of the people in the book felt highly one-dimensional and, at times, very poorly drawn. Additonally, Ms. Plain also can't seem to stick to one point of view, often changing it without any apparent reason within a single scene.

She has also created characters who are extremely diffiuclt to relate to or care much about. I never felt close enough to empathize with any of them because she passes up opportunities to connect events that could have easily give the reader something to empathize with.

For example, the author will create situations that seem to have significance to a character's experience, but then don't pan out. Anna witnesses the rape of a village girl when she's young and this affects her ideas of what men "do" to women. However, later when she finds herself attracted to Paul or when marries, the author never returns to the subject and Anna's own experiences (or fears) on the subject are never covered, not even mentioned. It is like this throughout the story: her parents die, she leaves her village, etc., yet the reader never gets the sense that Anna has been changed or affected; she takes everything with such extreme stoicism. When Anna does express her feelings on a topic (her brother's death) it's covered in a few brief lines of dialogue and then dropped, so that it feels that when Ms. Plain does take the time to convey her character's turmoil, she seems to be telling us rather than showing us.

Another interesting choice of the author is Anna's rather protracted affair with Paul. His professed love for her left me scratching my head. What had she done that was so entrancing to him that triggers a lifelong and unshakeable desire for her? She liked to look at his art books on the sly. Ooookay. Also, I couldn't figure out why she turned into absolute mush in his presence. And why did the author continue to throw them into such hackneyed and contrived situations?

The motives, actions taken and results of these, nearly across the board, feel tacked on, unbelievable and disingenuous. Couple this with extremely stilted and unvaried dialogue and I found myself forcing my way through.

There are some good moments, however, and some wonderful imagery, but overall, I just didn't care much about it. There was very little meat on this bone.

Wonderful family saga with strong characters. I especially liked the historical bacground that the author provided for the events that were important in the lives of the family. This is my second time reading it and it was even more enjoyable than the first.

I absolutely loved this story. Saw the mini series years ago and have been searching ever since for a copy of the mini series or the book. At last I have found it! ( would also love a cpoy of the series! Armand Assante was brilliant and Leslie Ann Warren was superb! [email protected]

EVERGREEN IS THE BEST BOOK I'VE EVER READ// PLEASE HELP ME FIND THE MOVIE WITH LESLIE ANN WARREN, ARMANT ASSANTE AND IAN MCSHANE I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR OVER 3 YEARS-PLEASE CONTACT ME AT [email protected]