Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

This author's first book made quite a splash and yielded her the Pulitzer Prize, but I wasn't such a big fan of it.  This book was on the New York Times notable books list and so I decided to give her a second chance and I am really glad that I did.  If you liked the multimedia in her first book, you are going to be disappointed that there is none of that here.  What is consistent is a feminist narrative that is soft and clear and true throughout.
The center of this story is Anna Kerrigan, the daughter of what appears to be a man who skirted the law for profit and disappeared under inauspicious circumstances.  Anna is left to care for her mother and her  sister with very disabling cerebral palsy.  She is fortunate that it is the height of WWII and women have entered the work force to do decidedly unladylike job of making machine parts at the Navy Yard, for which she is both well compensated and respected by her make peers. She goes on to do an even more specialized job diving, and when her mother leaves Manhattan after her sister dies, she stays.  It would have been unheard of before the war, but the world turned a bit upside down then, and Anna ran with it in an epic way.  The mystery of what happened to her father provides a side bar to the story, but this is a wonderfully well written story of the power of women.