Ellen Baker

When a young bride moves to a small Wisconsin town in the 1950s, she becomes obsessed with the vacant mansion that once belonged to the town's most prominent family.

Baker uses the character's fascination with the house to tell the story of its inhabitants from 1897, when another young bride arrived on the scene, moving through the generations as they grow up and deal with two world wars, the family's changing fortunes, and the restrictive view of women prevalent in the era.

Using quotes show more pulled from actual women's magazines, cookbooks, and marriage-advice manuals of the era, Baker paints a quaint and almost laughable picture of the advice being peddled to 50's women; yet a careful reading has to bring up the question of whether all that much has changed. Yes, women have made advances in legal equality and wage equality (sometimes in a two steps forward, one step backward pattern), but many still look outside themselves for approval or direction. Is today's young woman, struggling to advance her career, nurture her personal relationships, and rear her children in the effortless way presented by the media really any better off than the 1950s housewife who was instructed to always and only put her husband's wishes first? Is wanting a career but being told you can't have one any more stressful than being told you must have a career when you would prefer to take the Mommy Track?

Most of Baker's female characters manage to find a balance (though that balance is not the same for all of them, nor does it arrive at the same point in each one's life). Meanwhile, most of the men in the book seem to have a bit of difficulty keeping it in their pants. There's plenty of fence-jumping, unwise hookups, and rash decisions to complicate the already-Byzantine relationships set out over half a century.

It's an interesting read for all of that, even if this reader particularly wanted to smack a couple of the male characters upside the head, and occasionally became a bit impatient at the number of love-at-first-sight romances folded into the book's 500+ pages. (Hint: Some of them turn out better than others.) show less

A multi-generational, multi-family saga that starts at the turn of the 19th Century, stops for a bit during WWI, continues through WWII, and ends up in the great American post-war prosperity of the 1950s. It should be noted that one of the themes running through this well-written novel is the horrible effects that wars have on families and how these effects continue through generations, poisoning relationships as well as people.

Ms. Baker goes out of her way to make it clear how repressed show more the life of an average woman was during this period, not only through the voices of the female characters themselves, but by the device of having a quote from a marriage manual precede each chapter.

At times the passivity of the female characters was annoying, in that you wanted to reach into the book and slap some of them. But what saved it was the love that Ms. Baker has for her characters, for better or worse.

But one shouldn’t read this as meaning the book is some kind of chick-lit; in fact the male characters all fully drawn as well as equally annoying (at times).

All in all, a satisfying read, a sensitive novel, and one hopes to hear more from Ms. Baker in the future.

Denton show less

Make no mistake, Baker’s engaging novel takes some effort to truly appreciate. This tale of long-simmering family secrets performs many somersaults from one era to another and weaves together multiple POVs. Readers who prefer more linear storylines might suffer a minor bout of literary whiplash. That being said, a book that skillfully blends life in a circus, young love and DNA explorations into a twist-filled story that’s partially set in the Great Depression ultimately rewards readers. show more Could I have occasionally used a “cheat sheet” that reminded me who was who in this complex saga? You bet. Were there a few subplots that could have been trimmed? Absolutely. But in the end, this multi-generational story treats readers to unique insights about resiliency, friendship, family bonds and the true meaning of personal identity. show less

The cover and synopsis sell this like it’s a circus book so that kind of set me up for disappointment as I expected this descriptive, atmospheric coming of age experience in a circus in the 20’s and 30’s. Cecily is sold to a circus at seven years old, you see her hanging out in the stables, you see her living in a train car, you get the tiniest glimpse of her training here and there for a horse act, but beyond that, if you’re craving sights and sounds and getting to know more than a show more couple other characters in the circus, that is not this book.

This book juggles a few different timelines and POV’s, it isn’t confusing, though I did wish the voice had seemed more distinct for each character’s viewpoint and for each age we see Cecily at, her thoughts, her vocabulary, etc., varied little from age seven to teen to senior citizen, she mostly just seemed a naive, sheltered adult no matter her age.

While this story has minimal circus content to offer, there is plenty of domestic drama going on, aging and illness, the affect of miscarriages on a marriage, a recovering alcoholic, racial identity, interracial romance, the ugly truth about homes for supposedly wayward girls, etc., all of which held my interest well enough but were never quite as affecting as I’d hoped, maybe a case of simply too many issues to really have enough pages to dig that deeply into any of them.

Maybe that’s why for me the last seventy or so pages were when I felt most engaged, when more of that baggage was out in the open, being discussed between characters rather than held in, getting into the emotion of things a bit more, it gave the book more of a feeling of forward momentum than it previously had to the point where I wondered if maybe I would have rated this book higher had it been less concerned with gradually revealing Cecily’s hidden life and instead started at the moment where everything is exposed, as the messy aftermath, to me at least, proved more absorbing, the family dynamics then more deserving of exploration really than what came before it, yet it was then that things were somewhat hastily wrapped up.

I received this book through a giveaway. show less