Beauty and Attention, by Liz Rosenberg

It is 1954 in Rochester, New York, a city known for its cold winters, where summer sometimes comes early "and sometimes not at all." Libby Archer's father has just died and left her with a large Victorian-style house, no college education and a fierce desire to see the world and experience life. Pressured by her neighbors and friends to marry as soon as possible, the complex Libby yearns for more. In what she hopes is an escape to independence she flies to family in Ireland aboard an early transatlantic airplane.

Liz Rosenberg captures the suffocating, parochial environment of Rochester in the 1950s, as well as Libby's disappointment at the stifling mores found in Ireland and Europe. Mores such as marriage, which "she drew away as instinctively as a bird that finds itself in a vast cage. The bars were there, no matter how much she might try to ignore them."

Rosenberg writes in an afterword that "this novel is an homage to one of my favorite books: Henry James’s classic Portrait of a Lady, brought from the nineteenth century forward, with various changes, into the mid-twentieth." Is it ironic or sad that, seventy-five years after Henry James's Isabelle Archer fled upstate New York for the gossamer cages of Europe, Libby Archer also found herself entangled in that same web? Moreover, in 2016, sixty-years after Libby's flight, can we honestly assert that a version of this cage doesn't still exist? Beauty and Attention" is literature worth reading. Five stars.

(In exchange for an honest review, I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.)

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (October 25, 2016)
Language: English