Summer

I have mentioned in the past how much I love Edith Wharton, and this is still true. It took me a bit to get into Summer, but several days after finishing it, I'm still thinking about it.
My copy of the book is older than I am, purchased at one of the many used book sales I am too apt to visit, and it has that lovely faded late-70s, early-80s cover art that tells you "this is a lady book." The back cover of this particular edition describes it as the story of a woman's sexual awakening and whoever wrote the back-cover blurb was clearly pretty excited about that. But I don't think that's really a fair description. It's not wrong, it's just not sufficient.
Summer tells the story of Charity Royall, a girl "brought down from the mountain" and made a ward to Lawyer Royall, the "great man" in a very small town, in order to save her from a life of poverty (or so she is always told). She is not the most sympathetic character - she is terse, and cruel, and not particularly deep of thought. She lords over her guardian and basically runs the house, but she is unhappy. She meets Lucius Harney, a young architect visiting her sleepy town, and the "sexual awakening" begins.  Really what happens is that she meets someone new, with experiences outside her tiny town, and she starts to think and feel in ways she never has before.  For the reader, she becomes a much more interesting character, because she has a new awareness of herself and recognizes some of the failings that have been bugging the reader for 50 pages already! Yes, there is passion and Victorian sexy times, but that is only a party of Charity's experience and I really think to say it's all about her "sexual awakening" is selling it short.
Ultimately, the book plays out the way to think a Wharton novel will play out. SPOILERS.

Charity finds herself pregnant, Harney is engaged to another girl, and Charity ultimately marries her guardian.  Mr. Royall is a tough character to parse. He once tried to rape Charity (well before the book starts) and he drinks too much and occasionally visits prostitutes. But he does seem to try to help Charity during the course of the book and ultimately marries her only because he knows she is pregnant. On their wedding night, he sleeps in a chair. She chooses to marry him rather than try to force Harney to marry her, so she at least has some agency in this. But really it does all feel rather tragic. Charity had become a different person, with new ideas and something like hopes, and then she ends up back where she started with a man she always hated, dependent on him for the rest of her life.  I'm not sure if there's a moral to be gleaned. Wharton isn't telling a scary tale to warn girls of the dangers of premarital sex. She is bemoaning the state of women in the world, poor women especially. The reader is left wondering what Charity should have done, and why she chose the path she did, which I would say is the best part of the book.

I give this 9 out of 10.  Stick with it for the first 50 pages, it will grab you eventually.

Next up: #63 Incantations by Anjana Appachana