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Cargando... Keeping the Housepor Ellen Baker
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  LyndaInOregon | Sep 2, 2022 |    ) nyiper | Dec 31, 2021 | 1.5* From the book jacket: Set in the conformist 1950s and reaching back to span two world wars, [this] is the story of a newlywed who falls in love with a grand abandoned house and begins to unravel dark secrets woven through the generations of a family. My reactions The novel begins with a prelude set in 1896, when a young married couple come to Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, then moves forward to 1950, as newlywed Dolly Magnuson struggles to fulfill her role as the perfect wife to Byron. She’s young, somewhat naïve, and eager to join the nearly closed society of this small town. I was interested in Dolly’s storyline and was hoping for more insight into her maturation process. But Baker’s choices in the plot made me unsympathetic to this young woman. I found her easily swayed, overly romantic, and almost hopelessly immature. The additional “secret” behind the Michelson property, and the constant moving back in time to tell that family’s story, did nothing for me. It seemed like a melodramatic soap opera. It’s a pretty tangled web of intrigue and betrayal among a group of family members that … in my opinion … deserve one another. Okay … that was possibly too harsh as Anne and Elissa seem more victims than perpetrators, and Harry proves his mettle at the end. Anyway .. I disliked the bunch of them and finished the book only because it satisfied a challenge. Christine Williams did a fine job narrating the audiobook. She sets a good pace and her diction is clear enough to be understandable even at double speed. Too bad she didn’t have better material to work with. (  ) BookConcierge | Oct 25, 2021 | I appreciate the historical fiction component of this book. It's interesting to hear about roles of particular groups--women, vets, daughters, moms. But I do find all the decade switching to be a little distracting and difficult to follow (  ) knittinkitties | Aug 23, 2021 | 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 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. ( ) stephkaye | Dec 14, 2020 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Drama.
Fiction.
HTML: Set in the conformist 1950s and reaching back to span two world wars, Ellen Baker's superb novel is the story of a newlywed who falls in love with a grand abandoned house and begins to unravel dark secrets woven through the generations of a family. Like Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt in its intimate portrayal of women's lives, and reminiscent of novels by Elizabeth Berg and Anne Tyler, Keeping the House is a rich tapestry of a novel that introduces a wonderful new fiction writer. When Dolly Magnuson moves to Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, in 1950, she discovers all too soon that making marriage work is harder than it looks in the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal. Dolly tries to adapt to her new life by keeping the house, supporting her husband's career, and fretting about dinner menus. She even gives up her dream of flying an airplane, trying instead to fit in at the stuffy Ladies Aid quilting circle. Soon, though, her loneliness and restless imagination are seized by the vacant house on the hill. As Dolly's life and marriage become increasingly difficult, she begins to lose herself in piecing together the story of three generations of Mickelson men and women: Wilma Mickelson, who came to Pine Rapids as a new bride in 1896 and fell in love with a man who was not her husband; her oldest son, Jack, who fought as a Marine in the trenches of World War I; and Jack's son, JJ, a troubled veteran of World War II, who returns home to discover Dolly in his grandparents' house. As the crisis in Dolly's marriage escalates, she not only escapes into JJ's stories of his family's past but finds in them parallels to her own life. As Keeping the House moves back and forth in time, it eloquently explores themes of wartime heroism and passionate love, of men's struggles with fatherhood and war, and of women's conflicts with issues of conformity, identity, forbidden dreams, and love. Beautifully written and atmospheric, Keeping the House illuminates the courage it takes to shape and reshape a life and the difficulty of ever knowing the truth about another person's desires. Keeping the House is an unforgettable novel about small-town life and big matters of the heart. .No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Antiguo miembro de Primeros reseñadores de LibraryThingEl libro Keeping the House de Ellen Baker estaba disponible desde LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813Literature English (North America) American fictionClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.74)
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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 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.) (