Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.
A sweeping story of lifelong best friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who share a vacation spot and a moral exigency.
Dark confesses in her acknowledgments that she had “doubts about the appeal of two old ladies,” but she's written the rare 592-page novel you'll be sorry to finish. Eighty-year-old spinster Agnes Lee is the successful author of two series of books. She’s known for one of them, 30-plus children’s tales about a 9-year-old named Nan. The other is written under a pseudonym, six sharp social satires following a circle of upper-class Philadelphia girls like the ones Agnes grew up with. But as the curtain opens in March 2000, Agnes is having her very first experience of writer's block, described in one of many astute passages about the writing life: “Agnes had lost hope for today, too, but her allotted writing time wasn’t up yet. So she sat. Her rule was five hours, and dammit she’d put in five hours.” Just as she packs it in for the day, her best friend, Polly Wister, a devoted wife and mother, arrives for a drink. “We have a problem,” says Agnes. The problem is that they are two of the last three shareholders in Fellowship Point, a large, and largely undeveloped, piece of coastal property in Maine where their families have vacationed for generations. After the two of them are gone, Agnes’ cousin, a wealthy dolt, seems likely to sell out to a developer who would tear down the 19th-century dwellings, destroy a nature sanctuary, and overrun an ancient Indigenous meeting ground to build a resort. Agnes and Polly have other problems, too, each of them held back by choices made long in the past, some of which will be dug out by a nosy young New York editor who’s determined to make Agnes write a memoir. You will surely want to read this book, but you may be able to use its essential wisdom right now: “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”
Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982131-81-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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