Keeping the House: A Novel

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Keeping the House: A Novel

Set in the conformist 1950s and reaching back to span two world wars, Ellen Bakerâ€™ 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 Ottoâ€™s How to Make an American Quilt in its intimate portrayal of womenâ€™ 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 Ladiesâ€™ Home Journal. Dolly tries to adapt to her new life by keeping the house, supporting her husbandâ€™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 Dollyâ€™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 Jackâ€™s son, JJ, a troubled veteran of World War II, who returns home to discover Dolly in his grandparentsâ€™ house.

As the crisis in Dollyâ€™s marriage escalates, she not only escapes into JJâ€™s stories of his familyâ€™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 the struggles of menâ€™s struggles with fatherhood and war and of womenâ€™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 personâ€™s desires. Keeping the House is an unforgettable novel about small-town life and big matters of the heart.

Country	USA
Author	Ellen Baker
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9781588366290
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Random House
Manufacturer	Random House
NumberOfPages	546
PublicationDate	2007-07-10
Publisher	Random House
ReleaseDate	2007-07-10
Studio	Random House

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