Keeping the House

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

Dolly, a new mid-century housewife, meets with some marriage disappointments in Pine Rapids, Wisconsin. She becomes captivated by the once-grand Mickelson house, confident that possessing it will solve her ever-growing series of problems and dissatisfactions. She collects bits of the history and mysteries of the family that once lived there, and uncovers some rather stunning revelations in the end.

Generally, I tend not to be a fan of stories that flit back and forth between decades, but here it's been skillfully rendered, and I only took slight pause a couple of times to re-orient myself in time when returning to the book after a break. The device became irrelevant; after a few chapters I found myself almost as determined to reveal the show more secrets of the Mickelsons as Dolly was.

I've seen references made to the style of Anne Tyler several times. True, Baker's characters are nearly as dimensional, timeless, and engaging, if not as purposefully quirky. And there are elements both bitter and sweet, but, where Tyler's work often leaves the reader with a strong aftertaste of the former, Baker's ending emphasizes the latter. Which, in the case of Dolly Magnuson and Wilma Mickelson, is just fine with me. show less

I almost feel guilty admitting how much I enjoyed this book. Besides being a sucker for a war book, it definitely has chick lit feel, as well as a touch of the Jerry Springer train-wreck- that-you-can't-stop-watching feel to it (complete with incestuous love affairs with family members you don't realize are family members). For a first book Ellen Baker has certainly written an engaging, mysterious, dysfunctional delight that literally had me glued to the last two hundred pages. There was just no way I was putting it down until I learned what happened to every last character. One of the most enjoyable features of the novel, in my opinion, were the blurbs and didactic advice taken from 1950's Ladies Home Journal magazines and other show more instructional journals of that era. While a few of the characters are a bit stereo typical and the plot has a few weak points, overall Ms. Baker has definitely hooked me as a reader. I will be watching for her next release. show less

I nearly gave up on Keeping the House very early because the reader on the CD version is SO irritating. She overdramatizes nearly every line. Nevertheless, I stuck with it because I have a fairly long commute and need long audiobooks.

Well, this one is unnecessarily long. The author really strings us along. She alternates between several time periods, and often tells the same scene in more than one section, but without really giving a significantly different viewpoint as such a multiplicity of perspectives should do in order to make that technique worthwhile. This book could have been at least a hundred pages shorter. Was she being paid by the word? At one point she actually writes (I paraphrase): "He got to the top of the stairs. He show more could take a 180 degree turn left or right, but he always turned right, because his office lay that way." Why even mention this?? Here's another one: "He closed her door, walked around the truck, opened his door, sat down and closed his door." What kind of time-wasting padding is that?

FINALLY, I got up to the climactic moment we've been strung along for, and it's such a melodramatic cliche! *spoiler alert* Why didn't the author mention Florence the southern secretary EARLIER, so we could have had a chance at putting two and two together and solving the mystery ourselves?? I wish I had been this woman's editor. There is some good stuff here, but excessively padded and missing the impact it could have had. show less

I really loved the first 2/3 of this book - a well-written, compelling story with interesting characters. The last 1/3, however, was disappointing - rather trite and soap-opera- ish.

I thought this was a fine attempt for a first-time novelist, although I would have enjoyed it more if she had concentrated on just a few of the characters rather than the entire Mickelson family, plus some. One I particularly wanted to know more about was Wilma - I felt there was much unsaid and unresolved about her story. You can read more of my thoughts on this book at my book blog: http://www.alifeinbooks.com/?p=137