More About The Briar Club
Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
More About Kate Quinn
Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of southern California, she attended Boston University where she earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Classical Voice. She has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga, and two books in the Italian Renaissance, before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, The Diamond Eye, and The Briar Club. She is also a co-author in several collaborative novels including The Phoenix Crown with Janie Chang and Ribbons of Scarlet with Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, Eliza Knight, Sophie Perinot, and Heather Webb. All have been translated into multiple languages. Kate and her husband now live in Maryland with three rescue dogs.
Thoughts on The Briar Club
One of the characters in this story is a house! That alone will tell you that this is a book with an unusual twist to it.
I enjoyed the premise behind this book -- a group of women with nothing in common except an address forging bonds in the face of large and small challenges. The largest challenge is a violent act that is thrown at us in the first chapter, but only in hints. The victim, perpetrator and circumstances are behind a veil as readers spend the rest of the book getting to know all the residents of Briarwood House. But the small challenges aren't any less important, it is through those challenges that we come to know the characters. There were several surprises throughout the book including one at the very end that I never saw coming.
I'm a boring reader who likes to start at the beginning and finish at the end. But not everyone likes a book arranged that way. Gradually, I became accustomed to the dual (or triple) time lines that are intertwined that are so prevalent lately. There are two timelines in The Briar Club. The night of the crime (Thanksgiving 1954) and the immediate aftermath starts off the book but there are many flashbacks to tell us the stories of each of the women in the house as well as how they came to bond together. Personally, the flashbacks were a challenge for me...sometimes going back 3 years, 9 months, 1 year. It muddled things up a bit in my head. I was in such a hurry to finish the book and reveal all the mysteries I didn't take time to firmly understand the order of the flashbacks. I almost feel like I should immediately reread the book to appreciate the past events and the order in which they happened.
Overall, I enjoyed The Briar Club and its portrayal of the masks we all wear and the complicated way that relationships develop.
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