The Daughters of Erietown

March 15, 2020
The evolving role of women in middle America in the second half of the 20th century is illuminated by the story of one Ohio family, its secrets and failures, its hopes and dreams. The heart of this American domestic epic is expressed pretty neatly midway through by a delivery nurse tending to Ellie McGinty at the birth of her second child, an event missed by her troubled husband, Brick, and coordinated by a neighbor. Was it always like this? asks Ellie. Did women always have to rely on other women? "A woman's world has always revolved around...other women," the nurse replies. "We love our men, and the idea of a husband is a good thing. What woman wouldn't want that?" Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Schultz studies that question through generations of women: Ellie's paternal grandmother, Ada, who raises the child her son abandoned; Brick's mother, trapped in a brutally violent marriage that produced 12 children; Ellie herself, whose precipitous marriage to Brick in many ways marks the ruin of both of their lives; their daughter Samantha, who comes of age with Motown and career options. Like Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything, except with Catholics instead of Jews, the novel sharply illuminates evolving social mores and tucks in plenty of womanly wisdom. We go from Peyton Place (1956) to The Women's Room (1977)--and, cleverly, both books make cameo appearances in the plot. More cleverness energizes the dialogue. How old were you when you fell in love with Grandpa? asks young Ellie in an early scene. "I'll let you know," Ada replies. "We only had five or six boys to pick from, and two got eliminated for inbreeding." The minor characters in Schultz's fictional Erietown include some from central casting (a spinster aunt with a career, a caring basketball coach) and a few we haven't seen as much of (including a somewhat sympathetic home-wrecker). A masterful debut novel.

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April 13, 2020
Pulitzer-winner Schultz (for Life Happens ) delivers a sweeping, heartfelt tale that ranges from the mid-1940s through 1994 in Erietown, Ohio, and packs its plot with enough bitter pills to fill a Bruce Springsteen album. Farmers Ada and Wayne Fetters take in their seven-year-old granddaughter, Ellie. As teenagers, Ellie and Brick McGinty fall for each other, despite Ellie’s grandparents’ concern that Brick will turn out like his abusive father. Brick, though, wins a scholarship to Kent State, which would make him the first person in his family to attend college. Ellie’s dream, meanwhile, is to become a nurse, but fate intervenes, and she gets pregnant before they graduate from high school. Ellie and Brick elope, and Brick finds work at an electric plant while Ellie becomes a full-time mother to their daughter, Sam. After Ellie learns that Brick has been unfaithful, she threatens him with divorce, but remains determined to hold their family together. As a child, Sam is fully aware of the tension between her parents but unaware of her father’s infidelities until a visitor shows up at their home when she is 12. Schultz enlivens the narrative with sharp cultural commentary and precise period details. This story of family secrets rises above—and is tougher than—the rest.

May 1, 2020
The comfortably sprawling first novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Schultz (And His Lovely Wife, 2007) follows a working-class family in a fictional town in northeastern Ohio. Moving around in time, the novel centers on ambitious Samantha McGinty, who in 1975 becomes the first member of her family to attend college, and her parents, Ellie and Brick, whose lives are stunted early. Unexpected, if not necessarily unwanted, pregnancies feature heavily in the narrative, which takes more than a few telegraphed, dramatic turns. Though Schultz's sympathies clearly lie with the women of the family, who are held back from achieving their goals and fulfilling their promise by societal expectations, her warmth and compassion also extend to the men, whose bad behavior is usually explained by a cycle of abuse. She anchors the domestic story in the wider one of a fully realized community in which religion plays a significant role. At its best, the novel has an old-fashioned charm and a keen eye for the details of Midwestern life in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)