I've heard mixed reviews about Kate Quinn's latest novel The Briar Club (#1,250), but I have to come down firmly in the "Loved it!" camp. It's somewhat of a departure from her recent best-selling WWII era books, like Diamond Eye and The Rose Code.
Set in a women's boarding house in Washington, D.C. in the early 1950s, America is still recovering from WWII. Many of the women called to fill the positions in the Washington bureaucracy vacated by men during the war are still there, trying to scrape by. Briarwood House caters to these single women. The plot opens with a gory murder there on Thanksgiving Day. If only the house could talk! But wait, Briarwood House is a character here, adding a charming bit of whimsey to the tale.
Each section of the book is devoted to one of the women living under its roof: Grace, who fixes and feeds everybody; Nora who is proud of her position at the National Archives, but whose personal life is in turmoil; Bea can't quite get over the fact that her knee injury has knocked her out of professional baseball; Arlene, working enthusiastically for the House Unamerican Activities Committee under Joe McCarthy; Fliss, the perfect British mother who is slowly buckling under the weight of that perfection... There are others, plus the Nilsson family who actually run the boarding house. One thing is clear right from the start: each of these women is hiding secrets with deadly consequences.
I loved this book for the same reasons I loved Clare Pooley's two recent novels, or Sara Nisha Adams' books. They all address the issue of community in a positive way while entertaining the heck out of the reader at the same time. If only all the books we pick up turned out to be treasures like these!
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