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Elizabeth Appleton

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ASIN B000NXI7EU - Elizabeth Appleton (nee Webster) is the wife of John, a rising star among the faculty at Spring Valley, a college in Spring Valley, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth comes from a wealthy family while John... John does not. She's just in love enough to give up a lot to be with her husband and he's more than enough in love to want to support her without her family's money. Elizabeth's sister, Jean, arrives for a visit and is caught up, by several characters, on the goings-on about the small college town. It is partly through those tellings, and where those stories naturally lead, that the reader gets taken back to the beginning of Elizabeth and John's courtship and brought all the way to the current day.

John is being considered for a promotion that would, for the most part, be the first important "win" of his life. Elizabeth, meanwhile, has conducted an on-again off-again affair that frees her to be more than someone's wife and that appeals to her intellectual side. Still, she knows that she's not going to be leaving her husband any time soon - unless, that is, he happened to have something of his own, some important "win" that would give him some esteem and self-esteem. Everything you'd expect from a romance novel set in a college town is here: politicking and back-stabbing, gossip and jealousy.

Not everyone is going to love this book. If you're a romance reader, especially of modern romances, you have a certain expectation of sex scenes that will not be met here. Here, for example, is the first sex scene between young Elizabeth and John:

'The moment had come and there was no more to say. He got up and sat beside her on the wicker sofa. He kissed her and they stretched out together. He put his knee between her legs and she caught her breath in the new excitement. Soon he had his unresisting hand wherever he wanted it to be, and she whispered to him, "I can't stop now. John, I can't stop. You have to do it, but be careful."

"We have to take a chance," he said.

"All right, all right we'll take a chance," she said. "Yes, let's take a chance. Oh, my darling. It is over for you?"

"Yes," he said.'

Seriously, that's it. Of course, the book was written in the early 1960s, long before steamy sex scenes became widely accepted. The setting of the 1950s-1960s works the other way, too. A reader in, say, their 40s, will actually have to pause to let this sink in: These characters are your parents' age. A reader in their 20s might have a really hard time thinking that these characters are their GRANDparents' age. The book, read now, certainly makes me look back at my family tree with a different notion of who those people were before I came along.

It's well-written, risqué for the time and, most of all, heartbreaking. Author John O'Hara makes it very tough to root for one particular winner, which keeps you in suspense because no matter how things turn out, whether or not John gets his "win," you know that someone is going to lose. It makes you want to read the last few pages the way you might watch a gruesome movie scene - with your hands over your face, peering cautiously out between your fingers.

- AnnaLovesBooks