The Guest Book

Reviews / Votes

Thought-provoking and propulsive...Welcome to old money, new heartbreak and big secrets * New York Times Book Review * I was totally swept away by this beautiful, engrossing, ultimately heartbreaking family saga Sarah Blake's powerful, beautifully written story portrays a couple's secret choices that come to haunt succeeding generations. The Guest Book is richly atmospheric and morally compelling in a way that stirs the mind long after the last page. I loved The Guest Book. Sarah Blake has managed the extraordinary feat of writing both an intimate family saga and an ambitious excavation of the subterranean currents of race, class, and power that have shaped America. This is a vivid, transporting novel, written by a master conjuror of time and place. The Guest Book is not only an exploration of the past, but a prophecy of the future. It illuminates a lost world with a brilliance that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental as it leads its characters, as well as the reader, to new and disturbing discoveries about prejudice and privilege. Sarah Blake's understanding of private life at a certain time in America and within a certain class gives us an incisive history of manners and morals, with the understanding that the survival of the spirit, no matter the time, depends upon endurance, tolerance, and solitary grief. Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer, but The Guest Book is particularly fascinating. An intergenerational exploration of memory, identity, love, and family loyalty, of what it costs to inherit a name, a place, and a difficult alignment with history. Powerful and provocative storytelling. Epic and sweeping, without ever leaving behind the personal and profound, The Guest Book is a reminder of what novels do better than anything else. Without losing their specificity, three generations of Milton women reveal something about every family, the secrets and unspoken truths that color everything that happens to us. This is a book you will be dying to talk to someone about Beautifully crafted....The Milton family history, rife with secrets and moral failings, including a deep-seated bigotry, is a timely tale of America itself. An enveloping and moving page-turner * People, Book of the Week * The story of the Miltons engages not just with history and politics, but with the poetry of the physical world. This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga?it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society. Its convincing characters and muscular narrative succeed on both counts * Kirkus Reviews, starred review * This powerful family saga...is potent and mesmerizing * Publishers Weekly *