This was, perhaps, the weakest of all of Metalious's works. The characters and stories are disjointed, and setting is not enough to tie them together. I feel as though Metalious was looking at her characters as a series of misfits, and trying to pull them in as many directions as possible until they ended up with a sort of placid happiness. Her constantly deviating style, of introducing secondary, even tertiary characters, and then delving into their backstory results in a muddled mess of a narrative, and by never circling around or tying them all together, I was left wondering why we needed to know about them... pulled out instead of in to the story. This novel feels a bit like Sinclair Lewis, always rewriting the same plots, the same characters only with slightly different names. Metalious writes small-town like no one else, but eventually, it would have been nice to see her spread her wings a little.
I hadn't been aware that Grace Metalious had written any novels besides Peyton Place and its sequel, but this is surely proof otherwise. It's yet another account of the hidden side of life in a small New England mill town, as conveyed through a succession of individual backstories, but I quite enjoyed it. Metalious was typecast as a dirty-minded scandalmonger by the social mindset of the 50s, but there's nothing in here for the modern reader to find especially salacious, and it's now simply a decent story with better-than-usual insight into the human condition. I'm looking forward to tackling her final novel (No Adam in Eden) next.
