The Briar Club

Kate Quinn is known for her well-researched Historical Fiction novels featuring strong women (with my personal favourite of her books being The Diamond Eye )

The Briar Club, her latest book, has a different feel. It is a slower-paced, character-driven story filled with pertinent issues that affected women in the 1950's which gives readers much to discuss. Set in a boarding house for women, each chapter focuses on a different tenant with a few timelines thrown in for good measure. There's an extra POV - that of the boarding house - which was an interesting addition but honestly, there were just too many characters to keep track of. 

The story read like a bunch of vignettes centred on each tenant of the boarding house with a murder mystery thrown in (and kind of ignored) and several recipes because ... why not?!? I thought there was just too much going on and the recipes did not work well with the audiobook format.

If you're looking for a book that will enlighten you about what it was like for women in the 1950's, then give this book a try. If you're expecting a typical Kate Quinn story that dives deep into history with characters you get to know well, then then, like me, you may finish this book not feeling that a connection with the many characters who have to share page time. 

My Rating: 3 stars

Author: Kate Quinn

Genre: Historical fiction, mystery

Type and Source: eaudio from public library

Run Time: 15 hours, 30 min

Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld

Publisher: Harper Audio

First Published: July 9, 2024

Read: Sept 17 - Oct 5, 2024

Book Description from GoodReads: A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 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, 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; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended 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 apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?