The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

 

"It was a special kind of hell, Reka Muller thought, to be as old as she was and have to live among all these young women. Old women were largely invisible in the wide world, and for the most part she didn't mind. If you were invisible, you were ignored, and that meant you could do whatever the hell you wanted. But young women noticed you."

    -from the novel

I didn't much care for this book when I first began but it quickly grew on me! I have read a couple by this author in the past and enjoyed them and I found this one quite unique and intriguing.

The setting is a run-down boarding house in Washington, D.C. where several single women of greatly varying backgrounds have been brought into an unlikely friendship by newcomer, Grace March. 

The story begins at Thanksgiving, 1954, where Briarwood House is the scene of two murders! The author then takes the reader back 4 years and begins to introduce each woman with her own chapter, allowing one to wonder who did the killing and why.

We meet Mrs. Nilsson, the curmudgeonly landlady, raising her two children, Lina and Pete, poorly. And the boarders include Fliss and baby daughter (husband is a doctor overseas) and Nora Walsh, who works at the National Archives and is seeing a gangster (?). Other boarders are Reka, an artist and Bea Veretti, a former baseball player of the women's league during WWII. And we mustn't forget Claire, a library worker or Arlene, a proud member of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) looking for a "commie" around every corner. That only leaves Grace March, renter of the attic room, who holds a deep, dark secret---but then so do some of the others.

Quinn's writing is quite readable and pleasant. I really liked the "Interstial" parts of the book, where briefly the Briarwood House gives its point of view of the goings-on.  These were amusing as in "The house would roll its eyes if it had any." I got a kick out of historical events I remember---TV shows like "Ozzie and Harriet" and "I Love Lucy," the trials of the birth control pill, and disturbingly McCarthyism and serious homophobia. I didn't know McCarthy was nicknamed Tail Gunner Joe and had forgotten that Senator Margaret Chase Smith had stood up to his bullying. (Wish we had more like her in Congress today!)

Rating: 5