What Unites Us by Dan Rather

 

In these days before the 2020 election I have been reading Dan Rather's What Unites Us, recently released in paperback form. 

I was able to join Politics and Prose Bookstore's Zoom talk with Rather. He was interviewed by Jennifer Steinhauer, whose book The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress I read a few months ago.

Rather lays out the shared values Americans which can become a platform for building consensus in our divided country. 

One person, one vote. The freedom of speech, to dissent; freedom of the press--no matter how flawed. The importance of science and knowledge, even if we disagree over specific ideas. Education. Our desire to be an empathetic people.

Rather hopes his book can be a jumping off place for dialogue, starting a much needed conversation. 

Rather harkens back to his childhood and draws from his years as a journalist. He first defines patriotism as opposed to nationalism and ends with what it means to be a citizen. 

In the Zoom talk, a listener asked Rather if the country has ever been as divided as it is today. He recalled the 1960s when rebellions and nonviolent protests erupted over war and racism. Today, he notes, protests include a broader demographic mix in age, class and ethnicity. 

"I'm a reporter who got lucky, very, very lucky," the eighty-nine-year-old Rather responded to being called a 'national treasure.' His tip for aging well? Rather replied luck, genetics, God's grace, determination, and dedicating one's life to something bigger than yourself, and finding a life companion who sticks with you through thick and thin.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

Dissent can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it is vital in a democracy.

Like so many others in our country, I journeyed from ignorance to tolerance to inclusion.

Empathy builds community, Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back...I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership.

I remind myself and others that we have been through big challenges in the past, that it often seems darkest in the present. The pendulum of our great nations seems to have swung toward conceit and unsteadiness once again, but it is in our power to wrest it back. 

Ultimately, democracy is an action more than a belief. The people's voice, your voice, must be heard for it to have an effect.

I voted absentee last month, delivering my ballot to the city hall. 

Please--vote.

Eleanor by David Michaelis

"All her life, Eleanor believed that she had to earn love--by pleasing others, by undertaking ever more numberless duties, by one more tour of useful Rooseveltian doing.~ from Eleanor by David Michaelis

Compared to her beautiful parents, she was plain. Her mother was a social butterfly and her father was charming. Her mother nicknamed her Granny. Her alcoholic father could make her feel like a princess, but he was unreliable and could not save her. She struggled with confidence all her life.

She found happiness with her grandparents and while away at school where she was mentored by a progressive, free thinking lesbian. She would have liked to become a nurse, but was fated to 'come out' into the marriage market.

She married her cousin when he was still a priggish outsider. She saw him become a handsome ladies man determined to follow their uncle Teddy's career path to the White House. 

She bore nine children. She lost family to alcoholism and disease. When she learned of her husband's infidelity, her mother-in-law forbade divorce. She found love outside of her marriage and family with women and younger men.

"Martha Gellhorn thought of her as 'the loneliest human being I ever knew in my life'."~from Eleanor by David Michaelis

Remarkably, this unfortunate woman turned tragedy into strength, depression into action. She had been ignorant of politics and world affairs and had accepted the status quo understanding of status, race, religion, world affairs. She threw herself into the work of understanding human need. As she traveled the world and the country, she learned, expanded, and became a powerful voice.

She pushed her presidential husband toward positions of equity and inclusiveness and empathy and morality. She expanded the role of the First Lady, a tireless campaigner. 

She was a leader in the United Nations as they forged the first statement of human rights. On the President's Commission on the Status of Women she "identified the issues that soon became the agenda of the women's movement."

David Michaelis has given us a marvelous, empathetic biography of this complex woman. He does not spare Franklin Roosevelt or shroud Eleanor's deep love for Lorena Hickok in doubt. 

Eleanor is a timeless role model who should inspire each generation. Life did not break her, the times did not discourage her, public opinion did not stop her. Eleanor rose above it all to follow her innate moral compass and lead us all to compassion and a just society.

I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Eleanor
by David Michaelis
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: November 1,  2020   
ISBN 9781439192016
hardcover $35.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.

In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men.

Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people’s proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together.

Drawing on new research, Michaelis’s riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever.

Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour by Neal Garbler

 

I don't know when I was more moved by a biography. I was inspired and I suffered and cried along with Ted Kennedy. I was informed and I understood how we got to 'here'.

The "Shakespearean tragedy" of the Kennedy family is experienced through this youngest son. The most affable Kennedy, the pleaser, the people person, the least son, inherited a heavy mantle.

When President Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby took up his cause and legacy, grew into the liberal leader role with a heightened moral awareness. And when Bobby was assassinated, it was up to Ted to finish their work, and he became the liberal lion of the Senate, the moral consciousness of America politics.

Neal Gabler's biography Catching the Wind reads like a epic poem, the flawed hero doing battle for the least and the lost. The story is a tragedy, the hero's fatal flaws bringing his downfall, but in this story, the hero gets up over and over to take up the sword once more. 

This volume delves deeply into the Kennedy family character and history as the formation for the development of the children.

Finding his way to the Senate, Ted found his place in life, but the pressure to run for the presidency was both a siren call and a warning. Ted was sure he would be the target of one more assassin's bullet. 

Ted was a workaholic, and a drinker, and he had girlfriends and a wife who felt lost and, like her parents, resorted to alcohol. Then there was the encounter with the bridge on an island that gave his enemies the weapon they needed. 

Liberalism has been under attack for most of my adult life. I embraced it since mock voting in junior high; a classmate explained that Goldwater was a hawk and LBJ wanted to end poverty. My faith and my politics embraced the values of fighting for the meek and the weak and the downtrodden and the stranger and the impoverished.  

Following Ted Kennedy's career, Garbler shows how racism and fear led to the rise of 'law and order' after the social unrest of the 1960s, the anti-war and black rebellions in the cities. 

I lived through much of this history, my first awareness of politics coming with John Kennedy's presidential run, Ted's nightmare Chappaquiddick occuring when I was in college, the Watergate break-in carried out on my wedding night. 

As a teenager I was resentful of these conflicts and the pressure to politicize my life when all I wanted was to 'grow up'. I was also sympathetic, for I had seen the inner city and the racism espoused by working class neighbors. I was too naive to understand the racist implications of 'law and order'. And as I entered young adulthood, I watched in dismay as liberalism was abandoned by Americans.

Joe McCarthy's fear-mongering populism, Nixon's deep hatred of all persons Kennedy leading to his dirty tricks, and the fact that America ultimately rejected them, brings some hope that we can and will do so again.

I can not wait for Garbler's second volume. I usually read several books at a time, but I was so immersed in Catching the Wind I could not read anything else. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 

by Neal Gabler

Crown Publishing

Pub Date:  October 27, 2020   

ISBN: 9780307405449

hardcover $40.00 (USD)

from the publisher

The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy—an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality.

In the tradition of the works of Robert Caro and Taylor Branch, Catching the Wind is the first volume of Neal Gabler’s magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. 

Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father’s fortune and his brothers’ coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom saw—a man both racked by and driven by insecurity, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. he lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mother’s whim, suffering numerous humiliations—including self-inflicted ones—and being pressed to rise to his brothers’ level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues’ lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his “ninth-child’s talent” of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more: the custodian of their political mission.

In Catching the Wind, Kennedy, using his late brothers’ moral authority, becomes a moving force in the great “liberal hour,” which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning: a “shadow president,” challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. Catching the Wind also shows how Kennedy’s moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism.

In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne

 

Every scholar brings their own interpretations and insights to their subject. No matter how many books on Jane Austen I read, there is always something new to learn.

Byrne's book is entertaining and I enjoyed reading it. She considers Austen through the lens of physical objects that impacted her life. Yes, the famous amber cross gifted by her brother is one, and her writing desk gifted from her father. Also, the card of lace her aunt was accused of stealing and the bathing machines Austen would have used when staying at her beloved oceanside resorts. Each object is symbolic of an aspect of Austen's life discussed in the chapter. 

Of particular interest are insights into Austen's novel Mansfield Park. 

Jane had visited the estate of  the real Lord Mansfield who adopted a niece to be their heir. She was raised with Dido, the illegitimate daughter of Mansfield's nephew and an enslaved black woman. Byrnes explores Jane's knowledge of slavery through Mansfield, close and distant relatives, and her naval brother Franks' interception of slave vessels and his abolitionist beliefs. The Norris family name also had associations, for it was the name of a notorious slave trader.

Byrnes dissects the background to the novel's plot as reflecting what was going on in Antigua, the reliance on slave labor, the depletion of the soil, and brewing unrest. She notes that Fanny is the only one who wished to ask Mr. Bertram about the slave trade.

After reading Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, I was the only one of my university classmates who liked Mansfield Park. The morally superior, powerless, and sensitive Fanny stood her ground, which impressed me. But I did not consider what Byrnes addresses: that the word 'home' was used 140 times in the novel. She asserts that the importance of home is a main theme. "Is it a place or is it a family?", she queries. One of the transformative events in my life was moving at age ten, leaving me homesick and forever wondering about true homes and the homes we make out of necessity.

We can only know Austen through her surviving letters, her novels, and one authenticated portrait--of her back. I appreciate Byrnes deep exploration of these sources which helps to further fill out our understanding of the 'real' Jane Austen.

I purchased an ebook.

Patty Duke, Pollyanna, and Me

For no apparent reason, I thought about The Patty Duke Show. The show debuted in 1963 and was about an American and her British cousin who looked identical but had different interests and personalities.

If you are old as dirt (as one friend called herself) like me, you might recall the lyrics to The Patty Duke Show theme song:

Meet Cathy, who's lived most everywhere, 
From Zanzibar to Berkeley Square 
But Patty's only seen the sights 
A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights -
What a crazy pair! 

But they're cousins, 
Identical cousins all the way. 
One pair of matching bookends, 
Different as night and day. 

Where Cathy adores a minuet, 
The Ballets Russes, and crepe Suzette, 
Our Patty loves to rock and roll, 
A hot dog makes her lose control - 
What a wild duet! 

Still, they're cousins, 
Identical cousins and you'll find, 
They laugh alike, they walk alike, 
At times they even talk alike - 

You can lose your mind, 
When cousins are two of a kind. 

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/thepattydukeshowlyrics.html

Cathy 'adores a minuet' and Patty 'loves to rock and roll'.

The show premiered the summer of 1963 when I turned eleven years old and my family had just moved to Metro Detroit. I was still against rock n' roll music, a prejudice incurred when a friend's older sister played the car radio driving her sister and me to day camp. She sang along to Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Polka Dot Bikini, which I deemed  one of the dumbest songs I had ever heard.

This was, of course, a few years before Louie Louie (which was rumored to be obscene) and Wild Thing,  both of which I also abhorred as trite and silly but were big hits among the other teeny boppers.

I preferred songs that had a melody, sung by vocally accomplished people. Like John Gary, whose 1966 summer The John Gary Show I watched. I even spent my allowance on his LP Catch a Falling Star.

How influenced was I by the television versions of teenagers in The Patty Duke Show? 

I was such a prig in junior high, clinging to my (perceived) high values of only liking classical music and the symphony (which I had seen once in my life), valuing friendship over crushes, and preferring Napoleon Solo over the teenage heartbreaker Illya Kuryakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Did Cathy justify my bias?

This got me thinking about other role models I grew up with. Like Hayley Mills. I adored her films, especially the 1960 film Pollyanna.

I was thrilled when Santa brought me a Pollyanna doll for Christmas. She was almost as tall as my eighteen-month-old brother! I loved the movie and later in life read the book several times. The story about a missionary's daughter used to living with cast-offs and finding the cup half-full side of life taught me about the power of finding the good in even cranky people. I was determined to never dislike or hate anyone, an ideal I clung to for a very long time.

Later I enjoyed Mills in other Disney movies, The Moon-Spinners and This Darn Cat.

What role other models did girls have in the 1950s and early 1960s?

I watched The Mickey Mouse Club. I remember Spin and Marty. I couldn't recall any series about girls. I asked my husband, who a few years older than I has a more vivid recall of the show, and he couldn't remember any either. It turns out that there was one in 1958, Annette. I was six years old, so no wonder I don't recall it. It was about a country girl who moves in with citified relatives and has to learn the ropes at her new high school.

Like everyone else my generation, I saw the Disney Princess movies.

Ad for Sleeping Beauty 

Sleeping Beauty came out in 1959 when I was seven. I had a movie tie-in coloring book. And I was given a Sleeping Beauty doll made by Madame Alexander. I took her to show my friend and set the doll down as we played. My dog Pepper had followed me and she chewed up the doll! I was heartbroken. 

As an adult I replaced the dog-mauled Sleeping Beauty doll

As a girl I loved the Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies that were shown on television in the 1950s. I got my own gun and holster set for Christmas when I was three years old! 

In our make-believe play, we neighborhood girls fought over who got to be the cowboy and who had to be Dale Evans. The cowgirls always needed rescuing,--such wimps! Everyone wanted to be a cowboy. Later, I also liked Bat Masterson and had a Bat Masterson cane.

When I wanted to grow up and be a cowboy.

There was The Lone Ranger and Daniel Boone and Zorro and Superman. No shows about female superheroes yet. I did have Wonder Woman comics, thankfully. She was the only superhero comic book character I followed. I liked Brenda Starr comic books, too, especially because she was a reporter. 

There were shows about men or boys and their dogs, like Rin Tin Tin and Lassie and the movie Old Yeller. At least there were two shows with females: My Friend Flicka about a girl and her horse ran for one year, 1956-1957, and Sky King about a pilot rancher and his niece who also flew.

I loved Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges in underwater scenes. I am sure watching it led to my later love for Jacques Cousteau. An adventure series but I don't recall any women divers.

I adored the Dick Van Dyke Show. I wanted to BE Laura Petrie, married to a writer. I wanted to be a writer, but a show about being married to a writer was all they gave me. And yet, as much as I loved Laura, who did dance now and then, she was a stay-at-home mom content to be a wife.

There were family relationship shows and shows about growing up. I watched The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It's about boys and their relationship to their fathers. And of course, about Dobie's deep love for girls, all girls, any girl. I loved Bonanza....about a father and his three sons...Which reminds me of My Three Sons, about a father and his three sons... Petticoat Junction came much later, about a woman and her three daughters; it came out when I was eleven.

I watched fantasy shows like Mr Ed the talking horse (a man and his horse) and My Favorite Martian (a man and his Martian). And Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie both about a girl and her adored man...one who squashes her innate powers to suit her husband's ego needs and the other who wants to serve her lord and master.

I was too young to identify with California teenager Gidget, although I liked Sally Fields as The Flying Nun.

Where were the girls--girls who were spunky and smart and who could save the world if need be? I got girls who were daughters and women who were wives, lots of angst about boys and men, or comedians like Lucy.

I found the same issue with books. I loved reading The Black Stallion and other books by Walter Farley, all about boys and their horses. Old Yeller, the book and the movie, was about a boy and his dog. Wendy in Peter Pan wants to be a mother and clean house.

But books did give me some role models.

Charlotte's Web had two lead female characters, Fern who saves Wilbur the pig, and the spider Charlotte who also saves his life. I think it the most important childhood book in my life. It taught so many values. And the superhero was a female spider, also a mother.

I also loved Caddie Woodlawn about a tom-boy pioneer girl.

I wanted to grow up and be Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.

I loved Heidi and The Secret Garden, stories about girls who bring healing.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks by Mary Norton had girls and boys adventuring.

Dorothy had heart and courage in the Wizard of Oz.

As I grew older I discovered Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Jane was a heroine in her conviction and self-esteem that allowed her to stand up to power.

Since my childhood, great progress has been made and girls have had far more role models than I did.

What role models did you find as a child?

Covid-19 Life, TBR, Autumn Colors

With Covid cases rising, we continue to social isolate and order pickup and delivery. My last haircut was in late February. It's getting long!

Six of the quilters are still braving meeting outdoors in the park. It was 50 degrees out, we were bundled up, wearing masks, and had a great visit.

Karen's Monkey Wrench quilt

The rest of the quilters meet through Zoom. 

As does the Clawson library book club. Next month we will read The Bear by Andrew Krivak, who is to join our Zoom meeting!

I am perfecting my Zooming skills. 

Last week, I Zoomed with the Troy library book club. They read Song of Achilles and Zoomed with author Madeline Miller. She also discussed her novel Circe. 

And in previous weeks, I Zoomed to hear Francesca Wade talk about her book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars and with three historical fiction writers who wrote about composers, including Barbara Quick who wrote Vivaldi's Virgins.  

New books on my shelf include The Memory Collectors by Kim Neville, from Atria Books.

Other books new to my shelf include

• Nowhere Like This Place:Tales from a Nuclear Childhood by Marilyn Carr, a memoir
• The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication by Alexander Larman, about King Edward VIII  
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

And soon to come for an Algonquin blog tour,

• Astrid Sees All by Natalie Standford

We are enjoying watching the original and hilarious The Good Place and saw the new Rebecca from Netflix, a very interesting and competent interpretation of Daphne Du Maurier's classic gothic novel.

Our only travels are to the doctors. Luckily, there is a lot to see in our two-mile square suburban neighborhood. Like this Blue Jay that perched on the edge of the sliding patio door as it endeavored to get to some insect hiding between the doors.

And the Canada Geese who decided to take a walk down our street.

And the Halloween decorations.

Like much of America, we have been busy fixing up the house and finishing projects. Besides painting a bedroom and ordering a new kitchen table, we bought bookshelves for our TBR books and a sideboard for under the kitchen windows.

Many of my TBR books are from the library sales, but also from my brother and ones I ordered.

This week, my husband dug a hole in the garden and we buried the ashes of our four Shiba Inu dogs. Kili was our first Shiba, adopted when our son was five years old. She lived over 16 years. Next came Suki, a seven-year-old puppy mill breeder who needed a lot of TLC to make her a 'real dog'. Suki's first friend was Kara, a nine-year veteran puppy mill breeder. He taught Suki how to play and snuggle. Sadly, Kara was only with us ten months. He already had kidney failure when he came to us. So, we brought home Kamikaze, another puppy mill rescue. Kaze thought the world was hers and loved freedom and her home. She and Suki bonded as they aged, and when they lost their eyesight they aided each other in every day tasks--like finding the water bowl and going in and out doors.

Now they are all together in their forever home near the Pink Drift Roses, marked by a lovely Shiba Inu statue.

Our fur babies forever home

The roses are still blooming since we have not had a killing frost yet here.

Every day on my walk I find a beautiful tree to photograph and share on Facebook and Instagram. Here are some.

We voted. We got our flu shots. We are staying safe. I hope you are, too. It's going to be a challenging fall without normalcy, the pandemic impacting our cherished Halloween, Thanksgiving, Advent, Hanukkah, Christmas, and other family and community traditions.

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn/ Queen of the Owls by Barbara Linn Probst

The library book club read in October was A. J. Finn's suspense thriller The Woman in the Window.

I have read several suspense novels in the past and am pretty much over them. I dreaded reading 488 pages! Luckily, the chapters are short, there is lots of blank space, and I read it in a few days.

Of course, there is an unreliable narrator. Not one but two 'unexpected' twists. A murder, threat of death, mental instability, and all the stock noir memes. Finn saturates the novel with references to the classic, black and white, noir movies, the narrator's obsession. 

I thought it overwritten, too many cute descriptive words. And I early guessed the real villian.

Over all, the book club readers said it was a quick easy read that kept their interest, full of the expected thriller twists. One thought it contrived. Entertainment, if nothing more. 

Maybe. One reader appreciated the insight into agoraphobia. 

And yet the book spurred a great discussion. Was too much space given to Anna's drinking or movie watching? Did we feel sympathy or disgust by her behavior? What spurred her self-destructive behavior? How soon did we predict the real villian, if at all? We talked about bad parents, red herrings, and how familiar Anna's homebound life felt during COVID-19.

Readers did find the book very cinematic with detailed descriptions that brought the book to life, and learning a movie was made of the book, we were all interested in viewing it.

*****

The Queen of the Owls by Barbara Linn Probst came to my attention on Facebook's Breathless Bubbles & Books page.

The main character, Elizabeth, struggles with her dissertation on Georgia O'Keefe, trying to connect her time in Hawaii as a transition point in her art. 

Elizabeth's marriage lacks physical passion and emotional intimacy. She finds herself attracted to a photographer and together they discuss O'Keefe and her modeling in the nude for Stieglitz. She accepts his challenge to recreate the photographs with him as a way of coming to better understand O'Keefe and her motivation for modeling, if she was a co-creator in the art.

Plot-wise, the novel felt inevitable and unsurprising. The real interest is in Elizabeth's internal struggle for self-realization. She and her sister were early pigeonholed into narrow roles. Their husbands keep them confined to those roles, Elizabeth the 'owly' intellectual, her sister the fun and pretty one. Elizabeth is a good teacher and she believes in her work and can defend it. She has to learn to believe in her beauty, free herself to find real love, and take charge of her destiny.

Much of the novel's space is centered on O'Keefe's art and life, which I did enjoy.

The sexual issues are addressed with great honesty, from the marriage bed's coolness to Elizabeth's intense, unrequited attraction.

The novel is well written and an enjoyable read. Fans of women's fiction, stories of young women's self-actualization, or the art world will enjoy this one.

I purchased an ebook.