The Imperfects by Amy Meyerson
What's It About?
The fragmented Miller family is far from perfect — they’ve never been able to get their act together. But when the family matriarch dies and leaves a famous multimillion-dollar diamond to them in her will, they’ve got to try.In The Imperfects, (Park Row Books), author Amy Meyerson weaves a tale of historical mystery, a famous missing diamond, a Jewish family’s plight during the Holocaust, and the tenuous relationships of their modern-day descendants — the Miller family.
“The email hits the Millers’ inbox at 4:07 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, with news that Helen Auerbach has died. Helen is dead.”
The Miller family has never been close. Helen was their only anchor, and now she’s gone.
THREE SIBLINGS WHO COULDN’T BE MORE DIFFERENT
Helen’s daughter, Deborah, couldn’t connect with her mother and left home at seventeen, never looking back. At least, not until her husband left her with three kids, and she moved her family into Helen’s house on Edgehill Road in Philadelphia. But Deborah had her own life to live and left the kids with Helen. Now she’s estranged from her children, who never call her mom.
Ashley is Deborah’s oldest child and the most prosperous. Married to an attorney with two children, she lives the good life. But she soon learns that sometimes success is just a window dressing.
Jake lives in a state of stagnation in Los Angeles. Although his screenplay was a hit at Sundance six years ago, he has written little since. Now, with a girlfriend expecting their baby, he realizes his job at Trader Joe’s isn’t just a gig to tide him over until his next hit — it’s become his life. He’s a wanna-be.
Beck is the youngest Miller child. She has a brilliant legal mind but was expelled from law school when the lies on her application came to light. Now living on the verge of bankruptcy — still mired in debt from her mother ruining her credit years ago — the only constant in her life was her grandmother, Helen, and now Beck’s adrift.
After Helen’s death, Deborah is certain that the family sitting shiva together is “a twisted punishment from beyond.” It can only end in disaster.
When Beck informs her family that Helen left her a yellow diamond brooch that might be worth millions, they not only want answers but their fair share. The only thing Beck can do to prevent a family war is to share the brooch with them.
A PRICELESS FAMILY HEIRLOOM WITH A MYSTERIOUS PAST
After an appraisal verifies the 137-carat yellow diamond is most likely the Florentine Diamond — owned by Marie Antoinette and Napoleon and lost from the ruined Hapsburg Empire in 1918 — the Millers embark on a search for the truth: about how The Diamond disappeared, Helen’s childhood and rescue from the Nazi regime, and how she smuggled the gem to America inside a doll. What they learn is more than they bargained for, but might just be the key to repairing their disintegrating family.
Although everyone in the Miller family needs money, they discover they need each other more. And each asks: “Why didn’t we know more about Helen?”
Meyerson’s fascination with famous missing gems led her to research the story of The Florentine Diamond, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, and the rescue of fifty Jewish children from Austria during World War II. The disappearance of The Diamond led her to conjecture how it could have passed from the last Hapsburg Emperor into the hands of Jewish survivors and traveled from Austria to America.
Meyerson explores what it means to be family, both the devastation of broken promises and trust, and the rebuilding of the ties that bind us. We consider the truths that might hide within our own family’s journey: do we really know the stories of our ancestors? How has our family history shaped who we are and is it a roadmap for where we need to go?
