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Bookpage – August 2007 -- Keeping the House by
Ellen Baker, Random House -- By Linda White -- Midwestern author
Ellen Baker’s debut novel spans three generations of the Mickelson
family, who live in an imposing house on a hill in bucolic Park
Rapids, Wisconsin. The legend is that an Indian chief placed a curse
on that hill, the final resting place of his young daughter. Anyone
who disturbed it would be unlucky in love. Dolly Magnuson, a
newlywed just moved to town in 1950, learns of the Mickelsons during
gossipy quilting sessions with the church ladies. Somewhat
disenchanted with married life, she falls in love with the neglected
house, and wants to find out what happened to make the family leave
town. She sneaks into the house and tries to clean it up, but her
plan goes awry when the last Mickelson son, World War II veteran JJ,
arrives home unexpectedly. As she works around him, he opens up to
her and gradually provides the missing pieces of...
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Chicago Tribune -- July 28, 2007 -- Patchwork tale
-- Debut novel stitches together a wealth of characters and family
stories By Jessica Treadway -- Back in the day, a woman was
expected to present to the world the most attractive version she
could muster of herself, her house, her husband and her children, if
she had any. If she knew what was good for her, she also kept mum
about any ambitions she might have harbored beyond these domestic
ideals. When, near the beginning of Ellen Baker's first novel,
"Keeping the House," newly married Dolly Magnuson arrives for her
first visit to the weekly Ladies Aid quilting circle in Pine Rapids,
Wis., she chafes at the societal strictures dictating her demeanor,
her diet and her dress. The year is 1950. In the Ladies' Home
Journal and other magazines, excerpts from which the author
occasionally uses as chapter epigraphs, women are urged, for
example, to: "Take an interest in his appearance. Keeping his
clothes in order is your job; encouraging him to look his best, and
admiring him when he does, should be your pleasure." Dolly, who
yearns to...
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The Buffalo News – July 15, 2007 -- Author’s first
novel is rich summer reading -- By Charity Vogel -- Well,
I guess that’s about all I can expect out of Summer 2007. Is it
Labor Day yet? Because now, with the arrival of Ellen Baker’s
“Keeping the House,” I’ve had my two great warmweather reads — and
that’s probably all anyone can reasonably hope for. To recap: The
first, a few weeks back, was JoeAnn Hart’s “Addled,” which amply
filled that summer craving we all get for biting humor and caustic
social commentary, with its outlandish tale of WASP-y misbehavior at
a ritzy New England country club. Now, with “Keeping the House,”
here comes an equally lovely book in a wholly different genre — a
long, complex, heartbreaking literary novel, which tells the story
of a “cursed” old house in Pine Rapids, Wis., and the
multigenerational American family that lives there — and falls
apart, gradually and irrevocably, over a period spanning two world
wars...
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The Stanford Daily – July 12, 2007 -- Book Review:
Not-so-desperate -- By Emma Trotter -- I can’t deny that Ellen
Baker’s debut novel “Keeping the House” may appear long and baffling
if you judge it by page numbers alone. Even for us Stanford
students, it can be daunting to tackle a book with over 500 pages
during summer vacation — unless it’s Harry Potter, of course. But I
encourage you to curb that instinct and take a crack at “Keeping the
House” this summer. I promise you’ll be able to finish it well
before the release of the conclusion to Harry’s story on July 21st.
Baker relates the story of Dolly Magnuson, a 1950s housewife stuck
in a suffocating marriage to an older soldier whom she set her heart
on when she was only 12-years-old. In order to escape her
unhappiness, Dolly gradually begins to neglect her household chores
and focuses on fixing up the grandest house in all of Pine Rapids,
Wisconsin: an abandoned mansion...
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Booklist – May 2, 2007 -- Keeping the House.
[Baker, Ellen - Author;]. Price: 24.95; Publisher: Random; ISBN:
781400066353 (hardcover). -- As a new bride in a new town, Dolly
Magnuson is consumed with trying to be the perfect wife, as
determined by articles in the reigning womens’ magazines, and with
trying to obtain the perfect house, the abandoned Mickelson mansion,
a crumbling Victorian that has captured her fancy to the point of
obsession. As Dolly plies her fellow quilters during Monday
afternoon sewing bees about the fate of various Mickelson family
members, she hatches a plan to restore the house to its original
glory in hopes that her husband will buy it for them, a ploy to save
her sanity as much as her marriage...
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