Author: Marie Bostwick
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 384 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (VA, Washington DC, NY)
Summary: By 1960s standards, Margaret Ryan is living the American woman's dream. She has a husband, three children, a station wagon, and a home in Concordia--one of Northern Virginia's most exclusive and picturesque suburbs. She has a standing invitation to the neighborhood coffee klatch, and now, thanks to her husband, a new subscription to A Woman's Place--a magazine that tells housewives like Margaret exactly who to be and what to buy. On paper, she has it all. So why doesn't that feel like enough?
Margaret is thrown for a loop when she first meets Charlotte Gustafson, Concordia's newest and most intriguing resident. As an excuse to be in the mysterious Charlotte's orbit, Margaret concocts a book club get-together and invites two other neighborhood women--Bitsy and Viv--to the inaugural meeting. As the women share secrets, cocktails, and their honest reactions to the controversial bestseller The Feminine Mystique, they begin to discover that the American dream they'd been sold isn't all roses and sunshine--and that their secret longing for more is something they share. Nicknaming themselves the Bettys, after Betty Friedan, these four friends have no idea their impromptu club and the books they read together will become the glue that helps them hold fast through tears, triumphs, angst, and arguments--and what will prove to be the most consequential and freeing year of their lives.
Review: This book has such a great title, how could you not read it?! It started out slowly for me, but I think that's because my family is in town. Once I gave myself a longer chunk of time to read it, I was pulled in and stayed up past my bedtime to finish it.
It's the 1960s, and women don't have much control or power, but these four women--the Bettys--are starting to learn that they can reclaim their lives. I love that. And what they are doing doesn't seem radical now: applying for jobs, having their own bank accounts, filing for divorce, etc. And they do it all through a book group!
The author did a great job of capturing what life was like for women in the 1960s of a certain social class. The lack of birth control, say in their marriages, and a say in their lives all weighed on these women. But they weren't sure they were allowed to ask for more or different. Reading and talking gets them there. And help from women who had already stepped up. We must remember those that came before us and paved the way.
The story, the characters, the setting, it all worked for me in this novel.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
- Bookish--book club, journalists, and writing
- Literary Escapes--Virginia
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