Review of “Keeping the House” by Ellen Baker
I finished reading “Keeping the House” by Ellen Baker last night and I wanted to tell you about it. If you are an avid reader like me, you are always looking for a special book that you can curl up with like a warm blanket. A good book is better than sex and last WAY longer!
This is one of those books. In “Keeping the House” Ellen Baker takes us back in time to the days when women turned to The Ladies Home Journal for marriage advice, the 1950s. Each chapter starts out with a archaic quote from the magazine about the importance of pleasing your husband. Now I am not against pleasing your husband, but the mindset back then was that he seemed to have no part in the whole thing, there is nothing about him pleasing you. However, that was the way things were, and Ellen Baker does a wonderful job of showing both the satisfaction and the frustration of being a woman back in those days.
The story revolves around the Mickelson house, a big house sitting on a hill that has been abandoned for years. Dolly Magnuson is the main character, a young wife whose husband has uprooted her from her family and friends and moved her to a small bungalow in the shadow of the house in Pine Rapids, Wisconsin. Her husband is a typical. self involved 50s man, the world revolves around him and Dolly makes sure he thinks so. But taking care of her own house and being part of the Ladies Aid, a bunch of gossipy, hypocritical quilt making hens, is stifling for Dolly. So she begins to explore the Mickelson house, quickly forming an emotional bond with the house and the tragic story of the family who once lived there.
The book gets really good when J.J. Mickelson, the handsome, hard drinking, war wounded grandson of the original owner of the house, John Mickelson and his wife Wilma, turns up and catches Dolly inside. A tentative friendship is formed between the two and J.J. becomes an accomplice to Dolly’s deceit that she has been hired to keep the house.
The book goes back and forth, from the present 50s and Dolly’s life to the early 1900s through 1945 and all the things that happened to the Mickelson family that ended up breaking them apart and the house to be abandoned. It is the story of romance, of pain, tragedy, love and deceit.
My favorite thing about the writing in this book is that Ellen Baker took me back to a gentler, kinder, much more romantic world of the past, a world I once experienced my self as a young girl. I found myself smiling often as I was taken back to some of my own most romantic and fun memories while I read about Dolly’s feelings and the grand love affair between Nick Overby and Elissa Mickelson, a romance that truly was the end of an era, both for our world as it was back then and for the Mickelson family in this book.
This is a wonderful read. I was sad for the book to end.
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