Bittersweet

Author: Miranda Beverly-Whittmore 

Publisher: Crown, 2014
My Source: Louisville Free Public Library

Most of this novel is set in Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain. This location was particularly significant to me because my brother (Brian) and his husband (Tom), lived in Burlington for many years and I have fond memories of visiting them and strolling up and down Church Street. And that is where the similarities between my life and the lives of the story’s characters end.

Throughout the story, the main character, Mabel, is attempting to read Paradise Lost, the 453 page poem written in 1667 by John Milton. The theme of Milton’s epic poem is about the fall of mankind starting with Adam and Eve. This is a foreshadowing of what is to come in the story. Mabel’s roommate is even called Ev, short for Genevra.

The two girls are college freshman roommates who form an unlikely friendship despite coming from very different worlds.

Ev wore a camel-hair coat, drank absinthe at underground clubs in Manhattan, and danced naked atop Main Gate because someone dared her. She had come of age in boarding school and rehab. Her lipsticked friends breezed through our stifling dorm room with the promise of something better; my version of socializing was curling up with a copy of Jane Eyre after a study break hosted by the house fellows.

The story takes off when Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer with her at Winloch, her family’s summer retreat in Vermont. Mabel is thrilled that Ev is showing an interest in her and is excited for the opportunity to live Ev’s glamourous life if only for a few months. From the beginning, I had the feeling that Ev’s interest in Mabel was not genuine and this feeling built the suspense of the story and kept me reading to find out Ev’s motivations. During the summer, Ev alternates between showing Mabel a lot of attention and completely ignoring her, causing Mabel’s emotions to go up and down accordingly. This behavior by Ev played with my emotions also, as I identified with Mabel and her insecurities.

Throughout the summer, Mabel gradually meets the various members of Ev’s immediate and extended family. One of Ev’s aunts, Indo, is personally interesting to me because she has three dachshunds and I have two dachshunds. Indo quickly befriends Mabel and encourages her to find evidence of a long-held family secret. She tells Mabel she can find proof of the secret by pouring over historical family documents in the attic of the Dining Hall. Mabel becomes obsessed with researching the documents to uncover the secret. Over time Mabel uncovers, not one, but many secrets. Just when I thought Mabel had found the secret, she finds another one, and on and on. It was almost hard to believe that one family could be hiding so many things, and yet I used to be a psychotherapist who helped people deal with multiple family problems.  

Throughout the story the author hints that Mabel also has a secret which haunts her and she contemplates revealing at several times, but it is not fully revealed until one of the last chapters. In the end, Mabel is forced to make a life-changing decision based on the information she has learned over the course of the summer. She does not make the choice I expected her to make, nor the one that I would have made, but the story has a clever ending that I enjoyed.

Rating: I recently learned that the high five is rumored to have been invented in Louisville by University of Louisville Cardinals Basketball players Wiley Brown and Derek Smith during the 1978-1979 season so in honor of them I am changing my rating system from stars to high fives.

       Rating: 4 out of 5 high fives.