Juliet Wilbor Tompkins (1871–1956)

I think this is supposed to read as a light romance, but one of the girls in the novel is the president of a club promoting eugenics...so, too creepy to keep reading.

Re-read, May 2021: The melancholy aspects of the story stood out to me more this time. Might be a bit too poignant if you're in any kind of low mood or suffering from lockdown fatigue. And I picked up on something regarding the death of a character, a detail that I didn't notice before and that troubled me this time through. But still, a compelling story with an ending that implies much better times ahead for our heroine, and with some wonderful writing.

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Original show more review follows:
This was a special, sweet story that I would love to revisit.

Sarah Cawthorne is the only child in a repressive household. Her mother is loving and sympathetic, but her father keeps them both under his thumb by passive-aggressive tactics and sharp sarcasm. This has rendered her mother victim to nervousness and poor health. When Sarah is a very young child, she hardly knows that anything is wrong in her family, but as she grows up, the blinders come off and she realizes that her father's behavior has been selfish and that the family is in an emotional prison, symbolized by the high hedge that grows all around their house.

Sarah begins to take a few tentative steps out from the nest, finding her way with growing confidence. She finds comfort in writing poetry, and eventually a novel. Her childhood crush, now a practicing doctor, starts coming to visit. And she is also introduced to Christopher Saxe, a journalist who inspires her to push forward with her writing.

It's not hard to predict that these young people will form a romantic triangle. Getting to know who is Sarah's best match while she herself is oblivious is one of the quiet delights of the book. You'll definitely be rooting for the right guy. I'm smitten with him myself.

While this all might sound like the kind of light romance that's a dime a dozen, Juliet Wilbor Tompkins' writing has some real flashes of insight that take the story up a notch. Her characters are complex, and even the villainous is forgiveable. And the book has some real emotional weight to it.

"Remember that your mind isn't afraid--it is only your body," Sarah warned herself as she went in....She knew that she must look grave and composed and fully capable of recognizing it if anyone made himself ridiculous, and not even Mr. Cawthorne's merciless vision could have seen how her heart was thumping as she stood there, awaiting his explanation.
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Sarah had a generous imagination. If an aunt sent her a postal card and she had ice cream at dinner, she would go to bed feeling that the day had been rich with event.
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For two hours she read--only it was not like reading; it was like running, and loving, and laughing, and crying, and the warmth of kind arms across happy shoulders.
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The family unease became a palpable current, a physical corrosion eating into sensitive organs and hollowing the cheer out of faltering voices. Mr. Saxe, after doing his gallant best with no real help, looked from the father's bent head to the mother's strained absent face, then straight into Sarah's eyes with a grave question. It was so kind and direct, so free from small criticism or conventional pretense that it gathered her up like a strong arm and placed her beside him, unafraid and equal to anything.

So beautiful...

You can find this book free to read or download from archive.org or Google Books. show less

Quick and very cute read. This is about an 18-year-old girl named Pansy who comes to live with her aunt, who owns "The Oldest House in America," and conducts tourists through it with a spiel about all the historical artifacts she has in her house (hinted as being mostly apocryphal stories, but hey, that's tourism).
Their next door neighbor is an antiques dealer who is about 10 years older than Pansy and therefore ancient. Surprisingly, the more she gets to know him, the younger he seems.
He's show more clearly in love with her, but Pansy is oblivious and also a bit young for her age. Watching her grow up a bit and figure things out, and then watching them fence with each other as they try to edge a little closer to a romantic understanding, is pretty sweet. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins' men characters are great. show less

Fast, light read about a woman who loves, above all other delights, to "nest," in other words to create a home. This hobby reaches its pinnacle when she's actually able to buy a house, and she sets about the task of fixing it up. This includes hiring a housekeeper and a man to do work. Some of her choices turn out to be mistakes; while she does have common sense she's also naive. Nothing remotely unpredictable in this story, but a pleasant tale.