Kate Quinn is one of my all-time favorite historical fiction authors. Recently I had the opportunity to see her in person as part of a panel of historical fiction authors at a local bookstore. I was all fangirl that night. When a new book of hers comes out, I immediately buy it.
The Briar Club did not disappoint. It contains the well-researched history and complicated well-crafted characters I expect from the master, and the plot pacing prevented me from putting it down until I was finished. Although each character was very different, and had their own flaws and secrets, I was able to relate to (and root for) every one of them. Best of all, each chapter has a recipe, something that the character makes in that chapter for the weekly dinner in.
Summary: Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
Leave a Reply