Sweet and relatively short. Molly is a 25-year-old widow. When she was a teenager, she was in love with Alfred, who left to pursue a career. In his absence, her friends and relatives push her into marrying Mr. Carter, an older man with little personality. Some time after his death she receives a letter saying that Alfred is coming home, with the express intention of renewing their courtship. He looks forward to finding Molly exactly as he left her eight years ago.
There's just one problem: Molly's married life consisted of rich foods and little to do, so she is not the thin wisp of a girl that she was at age 18.
She flees to her next-door neighbor, Doctor John Moore. Doctor Moore compliments Molly on her looks and isn't totally convinced that she needs to become "a string bean," but he offers her his medical advice when he sees that she is determined.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear how much Molly and the doctor have come to depend on each other. He is a widower with a young son, and Molly has become like a mother to little Billy. She stayed up nights walking him in the garden when he was cutting teeth. She regularly plays with him, teaches him and cuddles him.
Her friendship with his father the doctor is rather uncertain. By turns he is friendly or stern, helpful or admonishing, and while Molly trusts him, she can't help but occasionally get angry with him. She especially resents the calm interest he seems to take in her returning suitor Alfred.
As Molly slims down and gets some amazing new clothes, she starts to attract a lot of interest from a couple of the young men in town. She journalizes about her conflicting feelings and tries hard to ignore the ones that are the most obvious to the reader.
Molly is an easy-to-read narrator with a sprightly voice. This was a fun, engaging little story. ( )

I love me my Molly! ( )

I unintentionally ended up with this book. . . what a delightful surprise! A Publisher's Weekly best seller of 1912, it's not a heavy weight read. It's probably the chick-lit of its time.

Molly is a young widow whose old flame is coming back to town. She's gained weight but wants to look her best and turns to her friend, the doctor who lives next door, for advice. (Clearly they didn't have enough diet books available in that time period.) The book chronicles her dieting, her friends and life in the small Southern town in which she lives. And she does end up with a beau/fiance in the end but it's not the one she originally set out for.

The way Daviess' describes the places and events draws you in and leaves you laughing. Example: "Men are very strange people. They are like those horrible sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then all of a sudden X works itself out into perfectly good sense. Not that I thought about Mr. Carter (her deceased husband - it was not a match made in heaven, and she was pushed in to it by her relatives), poor man! When he wasn't right around I felt it best to forget him as much as I could, but it seems hard for other women to let you forget either your husband or theirs."

Or this gem, after Molly sneaks off to the city to buy clothes that aren't black but tells her relatives she is getting a tombstone for her deceased husband. On the train back she runs into a man she knows from town and he comments on her sad errand: "What's a woman going to say when she has a tombstone thrown in her face like that? I didn't say anything, but what I thought about Aunt Adeline filled a dreadful pause. Perfectly dumb and quiet I sat for an awful space of time and wondered just what I was going to do. Could a woman lie a monument into her suitcase?"

A light read from a by-gone era, fun with delightful prose. ( )

I can read this old treasure over and over again. The author drops you into the story without any preamble. The conceit is this is a journal started by Molly to document her struggle to lose pounds and inches before her old boyfriend returns from a long absence. He has written, asking her to wear the same dress he saw her in last. Her picturesque thought processes and turns of phrase are adorable. She turns to the doctor next door for assistance. He is recently widowed with a young son whom she mothers. You can guess the outcome; but the trip is well taken. ( )