Alice Adams

“Reads easily, even breathlessly. . . . The subtle but intensely felt shifts of closeness among the young women are lovingly and expertly laid bare.” — John Updike
 
This ambitious and richly compelling Superior Women is in the grand tradition of The Group and Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others, a tradition continued by J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement.
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It is 1939, a brief, hopeful moment between the Depression and war. The Baird family--Harry, Cynthia, and their precocious daughter Abby--have escaped the burdens of their Connecticut life to salvage themselves in the sleepy southern town of Pinehill, North Carolina. But the Bairds soon discover that their new home is not quite as idyllic as it seemed up north. And while the family's fondest desire is to be enveloped by the timeless town and its eccentric...