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    The Hazards of Good Breeding
    The Hazards of Good Breeding
    The Hazards of Good Breeding
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Hazards of Good Breeding

    Written by Jessica Shattuck

    Narrated by Suzanne Elise Freeman

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This "richly appointed and generously portrayed" (Kirkus Reviews) debut novel tells the story of a WASPy, old-Boston family coming face to face with an America much larger than the one it was born in.

    Caroline Dunlap has written off the insular world of the Boston deb parties, golf club luaus, and WASP weddings that she grew up with. But when she reluctantly returns home after her college graduation, she finds that not everything is quite as predictable, or protected, as she had imagined. Her father, the eccentric, puritanical Jack Dunlap, is carrying on stoically after the breakup of his marriage, but he can't stop thinking of Rosita, the family housekeeper he fired almost six months ago. Caroline's little brother, Eliot, is working on a giant papier-mâche diorama of their town-or is he hatching a plan of larger proportions?

    As the real reason for Rosita's departure is revealed, the novel culminates in a series of events that assault the fragile, sheltered, and arguably obsolete world of the Dunlaps.

    Opening a window into a family's repressed desires and fears, The Hazards of Good Breeding is a startlingly perceptive comedy of manners that heralds a new writer of dazzling talent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9781541484054
    The Hazards of Good Breeding
    Author

    Jessica Shattuck

    Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle; The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications.

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    Reviews for The Hazards of Good Breeding

    3/5

    52 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Set in a colonial New England town, the Dunlaps are an "old family" going back to the Revolutionary War. Jack is the overbearing, arrorant, self-centered father recently divorced from Faith, his meek wife who has left her son Eliot with his father. Caroline is recently returned from college. Rock Coughlin is a friend her age who just seems to always appear out of no where, another educated but aimless young man.There are just too many plot lines: Eliot attempting to find his housekeeper/babysitters lost child in Columbia, Caroline who is trying to decide her direction in life; Jack who has made Rositta, the babysitter pregnant, and Faith, the wife who is also trying to deal with leaving her child. Really, this family is just a mess.Wanted to like the book as the author also wrote "Women in the Castle" which was excellent. This just didn't make it and was extremely wordy in places.
    • 3/5
      Good book, witty, but donating now to clear bookshelves for move.
    • 4/5
      This was a very good book in a long string of good books I have recently read that were set in New England. It's very similar to Nancy Clark's The Hills at Home. Both have a New England family with it's blue-blood life becoming less and less relevant in the present day. And both have the family being documented by a young man who gets a little too close to the subject. The Hills at Home, however, made me feel as if I was in the house with the Hills, where Hazards felt like I was watching a documentary of the family. Plus, where Hazards was occasionally funny, The Hills was often laugh-out-loud funny. The Hazards of Good Breeding was a very good book, very well written, but came too soon after reading The Hills at Home to make me forget that excellent book.
    • 4/5
      Well written, an engaging and human story. Shattucks characters are so rich and wonderful to follow, I am really looking forward to future work.
    • 4/5
      A vivid, compelling novel that has just the right mixture of quotidian realism and surprises. Every character in it is fully, passionately real, and the reader can feel the workings of the community that underpin the lives portrayed. The shifting view points bring compassion to the most seemingly unlikeable characters, and the prose is nicely taut.