Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of June 2016: It s hard to describe this novel clearly. It s a fable, it s an ultra-realistic look at the class system in America, it s a love story and it s a period piece. Set in the 1960s and 70s, Sons and Daughters begins straightforwardly enough: a privileged young wife and mother learns from her family lawyer that all of their wealth is gone. But if from that you expect a straightforward story of a couple facing the ultimate of first world problems, a la The Nest--and I kind of did--you will be plenty surprised. Adrift and confused, Fern and Edgar each wander off into their own fantasy worlds: he (of course) with a neighborhood Siren; she, more imaginatively, with a giant she met while impersonating a bride at an old folks home. (Yes, that s what I said.) Their young children, meanwhile, are accidentally left alone for days and get up to the kind of gentle trouble last found in old-fashioned fairy tales or maybe a Shakespeare comedy. See what I mean? It sounds silly. And yet, thanks to Ausubel s dreamlike prose and her careful parsing of the magical realism--think Alice Hoffman not Gabriel Garcia Marquez--the novel opens into a magical force field that even doubters somehow can t manage to escape. --Sara Nelson, The Amazon Book Review