The review: Caro’s fleet, assured debut centers on class and love in the late 19th century in what was then America’s most prim city, Boston. In the sprawling—and splendidly described—Bon Vive estate, where the patriarch and his wife live essentially separate lives, young Victoria Bon Vive comes of age with one dear friend, Xander, the son of the Bon Vive’s gardener, despite her mother’s admonitions to avoid that “filthy” child. At age sixteen, Victoria and Xander share a kiss, not long before she’s spirited away to New York’s Bennett School for Girls, and he finds his own ambitions–such as a pioneering irrigation system for the estate’s crops and greenhouse—thwarted by the disinterest of rich swells who consider themselves his better.
“I can’t go back to being a porcelain doll,” Victoria tells Xander. As this unlikely pair ages, they feel around for fresh life possibilities—Victoria dreams of becoming a teacher, much to her mother’s disgust. Secrets come to light, fortunes are threatened, and American society and geography works against them, as new commitments and relationships pull Victoria and Xander further apart, especially when Xander finds opportunity in San Francisco, a bold city on the make.
Caro dishes this story in crisp, swift chapters that have an inviting whiff of high-end gossip about them, especially as the story checks in, in brief and to-the-point passages, on the sprawling cast and each individual’s secret desires, schemes, and disappointments. The expectations of what it means to be “Boston proper” loom over the characters’ choices, and Caro proves adept at plotting and pacing a story that never allows the repressive forces that dominate it to slow down the narrative or limit its emotional resonance. At times, the prose could benefit from more polish, but the novel pulses with feeling, revelations, and the great concern of historical novelists—the question of what it felt like to be human in a particular time and place.
Takeaway: A bold, brisk historical novel of class, romance, and 19th century Boston mores.
Great for fans of: Renée Rosen’s The Social Graces, Nancy Zaroulis’s Call the Darkness Light.
Marketing copy: A