 Thursday, 8/6 at 7 Monday, 8/10 at 7 Thursday, 8/13 at 4 Saturday, 8/22 at 7 | 
Wednesday, 8/26 at 7:30 Saturday, 8/29 at 11:00 am Saturday 9/12 and Sunday 9/13 Thursday, 9/24 at 3:30
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The strength of "The Wet Nurse's Tale" .... the common-sense character of Susan Rose, who is far from the received notion of bawdy, but nobody's victim, either. And also for the hundred little details about what it was like to keep a middle-class home going then, how a poor person managed to change her wardrobe, how the shopping got done and the babies got raised. The whole notion is light-years away from noblemen out on prancing horses looking for girls to ravish, but it may be a pretty good take on how people actually lived in those days. I liked it very much. (read more)
~Washington Post
"The hilarious heroine of Erica Eisdorfer's debut novel, The Wet Nurse's Tale." (See where she falls on The Approval Matrix)
~New York Magazine
"In her first novel, Eisdorfer offers as a guide to Victorian England her entertaining and surprising protagonist, Susan Rose. A bawdy young woman who could easily have walked off the pages of The Canterbury Tales, Susan ends up wet-nursing after getting unexpectedly and illicitly pregnant, and her alcoholic and abusive father forces her to leave her child and take up the occupation. Her journey into the intimate lives of England’s upper crust proves an illuminating and dangerous one as Susan jumps from family to family—until her father sells her son. As Susan attempts to balance other peoples’ babies with her quest to regain her own, she is faced with difficult choices between duty and love, and between her life and her child’s. Whether she is carousing in the Jewish quarter or planning how to reclaim her son, Susan navigates the stratified social world with humorous vigor. A promiscuous, randy and hefty lady, Susan’s a vibrant character, at once sweet and scheming, and given to such a crass frankness that even readers wary of historicals may want to give this a look."
~Publishers' Weekly
“I’ve got what rich ladies need right here in front of me,” says Susan Rose, the savvy, endearing protagonist of Eisdorfer’s gripping first novel. What this Victorian-era English wet nurse is referring to, of course, are her own breasts. … (read more)
From MORE Magazine
July/August 2009
"Miss Susan Rose is the narrator and protagonist of this tale, which takes place in Victorian England. Raised by a surly father and caring mother, Susan must leave home to work at a neighboring manor house. She is free with her favors and thoughtless about her future, which she readily admits, but she’s flattered by the attention she’s receives from the heir to the manor. Soon she is pregnant and must return home. When her son is a month old, her father insists with fists and anger that she leave her child behind and become a wet nurse as her own mother has done since the birth Susan’s oldest sibling.
Thus begins one of the best stories I have read in a while. As Susan sits quietly in the nursery of her employers, she is privy to goings-on in the rest of the household, and it’s not long before her honesty and wisdom are appreciated by all who come to know her. She describes herself as having a lumpy body and a nose like a potato, but she’s smart, tenacious, promiscuous when need be, and brutally honest about herself and those around her. She’s not pretty, but she’s real. When her second child is born out of wedlock, she is forced to go home once more. Her irate father decides that the child would only hinder Susan’s ability to make him money and gives her son away.
Reader, her frantic search to find her Davey will have you cheering on one page and teary-eyed on the next. The ending is uplifting and joyful. The small vignettes between the chapters are an added treat as well. I highly recommend this first novel by Erica Eisdorfer."
From Historical Novels Review, August 2009