“A you-can’t-put-it-down book. . . . Alice Adams has found a new way to tell the great American dynasty stories we all love.” --The Washington Post

Alice Adams’ second novel is the portrait of a Southern-born woman as she reviews her life.

From Louisa Calloway’s Southern girlhood to her debut to her first marriage, all the time surrounded by a certain tradition and all the time resisting. In lieu of her conservative, bigoted father, she chooses men who are liberal, free-spoken, Jewish. Nevertheless her first marriage is unhappy, but her second promises to be sounder, as she discovers what she really wants, can have, can become—what she really is.