I wish I could say that I loved this book, but I didn't. I was looking forward to it with high expectations because I had read a story by the author in the 2007 Best American Short Stories which just took my breath away.

I think this is an ambitious novel with plenty of elements that I usually like: a young woman who is quirky and intelligent, plenty of history, a family tree which figures in the story and a bit of the supernatural. But I found it hard to follow, which is saying a lot, because I can follow even the most convoluted novels. I just could not completely believe Willie Upton, the twenty-something heroine and I could not get a grasp of her mother, Vi, in such a way as to feel involved with either one.

Willie has gotten herself into a jam and come home from an archeology dig that would have figured in her graduate thesis. She feels she has totally blown it and that her life is ruined. For such an independent and intelligent young woman, she spends the whole book being nasty to the mother she came home to for shelter and being about as silly emotionally as any chick lit heroine. It didn't seem to fit together right.

Getting through the novel was an effort, took way too long for a mere 361 pages and while the reader is supposed to feel that Willie changed and grew, I didn't. However, due to the story that introduced me to Lauren Groff and to the large amount of potential I see in the novel, I will certainly read the next one she writes.

From 1907 to 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright carried on a love affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were both married to others when the affair began and it caused a great scandal in Chicago as well as around the country. Having always been an admirer of Wright as an architect, I now know plenty about him as a person. He comes across as a hard man to be in love with. But for Mamah Cheney, a highly educated and extremely intelligent woman, he brought excitement, passion and a full life. She had married at the age of 29 to a man she did not love. Her husband was not a bad man, but motherhood and middle-class life turned out to be stifling for Mamah.

Nancy Horan did a fine job of telling this story. I was annoyed, as I always am, by dialogue that sounded modern. (I am pretty sure that people did not talk that way in the early 1900s.) But I was drawn into the story. In today's world, not many would be shocked by such an affair. Mamah would not have had the added battle of fighting the mores of the time, which also caused her children additional suffering. While in Europe with Frank, Mamah met Ellen Key, a famous Swedish feminist of the times and became her translator. Again this turned out to be a blessing and a curse. It was a very hard time to be a woman but despite all the grief and tragedy, it must have been thrilling as well.

I read a quote the other day that went something like, "Well behaved women do not make history." Mamah Borthwick Cheney was a very badly behaved woman of her day but contributed to changing history for women. I am glad her story has been told.