Bardwell's Folly

Bardwell’s Folly by Sandra Hutchison   342 pages

I’ve read Sandra Hutchison’s first two novels (The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire and The Awful Mess) and loved them both. Now there is a third novel for me to love and tell all my reader friends to grab a copy.

In this story, Eudora “Dori” Bardwell and her stoner brother, Salinger, are living in a small town in upper Massachusetts. The house is a replica of a southern plantation home her father, Bedford Bardwell, built as a living legacy to himself and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tea and Slavery, which was considered the most important work of fiction about slavery since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The house, known as Bardwell House, is a historical landmark in town, and the townspeople are very, very fond of it. A board of trustees runs the house, but thanks to her father’s will, Dori and Salinger are allowed to live there. Unfortunately they aren’t allowed to make any changes, so the summer heat is stifling. In other words, no air conditioning.

The air conditioning is only one symbol of how out-of-touch Dori is with the modern world. She doesn’t have an answering machine, a computer, or a mobile phone. Now 26, Dori had to leave college when her father flew his plane with her mother and four other siblings into the ocean (aka John Kennedy, Jr.) years earlier. She barely makes ends meet working at as a nursing home aide and a part-time grocery clerk. She may live in what seems like a mansion, but the cupboards are bare. Many nights she goes to bed hungry.

When the trustees decide to hire a service to keep up the lawn, to keep up appearances, Dori comes face-to-face with her high school sweetheart, a man whose marriage proposal she refused in front of the whole high school. Sparks fly.

Thanks to an insensitive racial joke, which blew up on social media, Dori’s family in once again in the spotlight. For years, there had been rumors of an unfinished manuscript that her father left behind. When a reporter comes snooping around, interest in finding the manuscript becomes important to the board and leads Dori’s to uncover deep family secrets.

A mixture of romance, intrigue, family secrets, past lives, and a house that is as much a character as Tara was in Gone With the Wind, create a spell-binding read that you won’t want to put down. I give Bardwell’s Folly 6 out of 5 stars.