home

Add Review, Blurb, Quote

Add

Activity

Activity

Profile

Welcome to Litsy!

Litsy is a place to share and discover your favorite books with your favorite people.

Litsy is available on the web, for iOS and Android.

Itā€™s fun. ā€ÆItā€™s simple. ā€ÆItā€™s all about the book. Sign up and get a little Litsy.

To respect member's privacy and keep things awesome, most of Litsy is hidden from Google. We let humans see and share pages, but not machines. Find out more.

This page is: Hidden

Trending Hashtags

19 users recently

43 users recently

7 users recently

8 users recently

11 users recently

21 users recently

Trending Books

Untitled

Untitled

39 users recently

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

10 users recently

Michael Miller

18 users recently

Nancy Drew 16: The Clue of the Tapping Heels

Nancy Drew 16: The Clue of the Tapping Heels

Carolyn Keene

14 users recently

A Court of Thorns and Roses

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Sarah J. Maas

7 users recently

About | Help / FAQs | Privacy | Terms | Press | Resources

Margot: A Novel

Margot: A Novel | Wendell Steavenson

3 posts | 3 read | 3 to read

A moving portrait of a young woman’s struggle to break free of her upper-class upbringing amid the whirlwind years of the sexual revolution. It’s the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York and her family’s sumptuous Oyster Bay estate as the presumed heir to her late grandfather’s steel fortune. Her domineering mother has charted a course for her—to forego education and marry well—but Margot is more interested in microscopes and beetles and books. When a devastating fire brings the family legacy crashing down and the sexual revolution dawns, a new path opens up—the expansive world of late-1960s Radcliffe College and the intellectual, cultural, and sexual freedom Margot has been reaching for. Hailed for her “intelligent and heartfelt fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), Wendell Steavenson writes with grace, precision, and great psychological perception. With Margot, she has crafted a vivid portrayal of the quiet torment of young women of its era, a comically caustic mother-daughter story, and a memorable evocation of one woman’s passion for the wonder of science.

Amazon

Indiebound

Barnes and Noble

WorldCat

Goodreads

LibraryThing

100%

review

Margot: A Novel | Wendell Steavenson

Pick

pick

Took advantage of today's snow day to finish this #arc. A coming-of-age story set in the 50s & 60s during political change & the sexual revolution. Margot grows up amidst wealth & privilege with a highly critical mother for whom marriage is the end goal. At Radcliffe, she studies science and dreams of grad school while having fuzzy relationships with men, always seeing herself as a problem. Margot's persistent uncertainty colors the novel. š‘‡

merelybookish It's like the whole story is told in muted tones that kept me feeling a bit detached. Overall a well-written albeit subdued character study. 2y

BarbaraBB Nice title š€ 2y

merelybookish @BarbaraBB Haha. Yes. š„ Might have been a factor in why I wanted to read it. 2y

61 likes1 stack add3 comments

review

Margot: A Novel | Wendell Steavenson

Pan

pan

The sales rep loved it. It had a strong start, so I pushed to read it before a rec deadline. But I lost steam partway through, when a side character‘s abortion-regret kept threading into the main story - and I actively disliked the style of the ending: more in a spoiler comment below. #ARC

akaGingerK Instead of ending the novel ambiguously, continuing the story longer, or even doing an epilogue, the story ends in a weird series of ā€what he didn‘t knowā€¯ and ā€what she didn‘t know yetā€¯ statements about the various characters. Distancing & strange. 2y

7 likes1 comment

quote

Margot: A Novel | Wendell Steavenson

ā€Colors, Margot divined, were not like rainbow creations, there were more complicated than they appeared, like adults, changeable, possibly untrustworthy.ā€¯ #ARC