KEEPING THE HOUSE by Ellen Baker
Publisher Random House, July 2007
A newly wed housewife in the conformist 1950s falls in love with a grand
abandoned house in town, and begins to unravel a family’s dark secrets.
When Dolly Magnuson moves to 1950s Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, she discovers all
too soon that making marriage work is harder than it looks in the pages of
the Ladies’ Home Journal. As Dolly adapts to her new life—keeping the house,
supporting her husband’s career, fretting about dinner menus, and
half-heartedly joining the Ladies Aid quilting circle—her loneliness and
restless imagination are seized by an abandoned dove-gray house set high
atop a hill overlooking the town.
Soon, Dolly learns that the stately house belongs to the once-prominent
Mickelson family; and so unravels a story that runs parallel to her own,
beginning in 1896, of a fabled lover’s curse hanging over the grand and
mysterious house and its inhabitants. Rich in 1950s atmosphere and detail,
in wartime heroism and forbidden love, in the struggles of a new marriage
and in the art of quilting, in lost innocence, longing and ultimately
rebellion and reconciliation, Keeping the House is a superb first novel of
small town life and big matters of the heart by a wonderful new writer
certain to please book groups and fans of writers such as Anne Tyler and
Elizabeth Berg. 
“Ellen Baker’s first novel, KEEPING THE HOUSE, is a quilt that grids a
small Midwestern town in the middle of the last century. Under this writer’s
deft hands, each square is a story, a mystery, an indiscretion, a tale of
the great house and grand family who once ruled there. Even more, it
captures the roles of women then, living embodiments of demure ideals, and
those who couldn’t fit the pattern. Edith Wharton’s novels of domestic
despair and display come to mind with each page.
-- Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean
“Ellen Baker’s first novel is a wonder! KEEPING THE HOUSE is a great big
juicy family saga; a romantic page-turner with genuine characters written
with a perfect sense of history, time and place. Her portrayal of the
American housewife is hilarious and heartbreaking. I couldn’t have liked it
more!”
-- Fannie Flagg, author of Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven
“A born storyteller, Ellen Baker has written an enthralling family saga
filled with three generations of memorable characters and capturing the
dreams and frustrations of twentieth century women. Wonderful, spot-on
historical detail.”
-- Faith Sullivan, author of Gardenias and The Cape Ann
"Ellen Baker has written the novel I've been waiting to read for a very long
time. It's the book you want to curl up with, the book you rush home the
book you wish you'd written. In Keeping the House Ellen Baker serves up the
complexities of family relationships, the anguish of victims of wars, the
innermost thoughts of women, and the social mores of the past. Seasoned with
mysteries that kept me devouring pages, this is one huge gourmet feast of a
book for readers to savor. I look forward to every delicious book this
author writes."
-- Bev Marshall, author of Walking Through Shadows and
Right As Rain
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