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Daughters of the RevolutionBook Description
From the O. Henry Award-winning author of the story collection The Bostons - a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and winner of the PEN Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers - an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.
It's 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and enemies as God. With Cape Wilde engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation, and the sexual revolution, God has confidently promised coeeducation "over my dead body." And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carol Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.
What does it mean to be the First Girl?
Carolyn Cooke has written a ferociously intelligent, richly sensual novel about the lives of girls and women, the complicated desperation of daughters without fathers, and the erosion of paternalistic power in an elite New England town on the cusp of radical social change. Remarkable for the precision of its language, the incandescence of its images, and the sly provocations of its moral and emotioanl predicaments, Daughters of the Revolution is a novel of exceptional force and beauty."
Press
"Cooke writes with such delicacy and control, such luminous warmth, that the only disappointment comes when the book ends."
-The Boston Globe
"...shimmers with intimate and revealing detail."
-The New York Times
"Cooke's writing is so sensuous and alert that it would be easy to miss the novel's symbolic qualities."
-The New Yorker
"This is a dramatic social novel, a successful entwining of people that comes to signify the Big Moment of history. Cooke, who not once lets a sentence flag, who can reinvent the known with imagery so fine it feels like a dare, evokes the dawn of women's liberation, the righteous struggles for sexual voice...her profound, honest compassion for all her characters, men and women, makes them so engrossing, you almost forget what they're up against."
-The San Francisco Chronicle
"Mordantly funny and coolly streamlined, deeply humane and slyly wise."
St. Petersburg Times
"Exuberant bad behavior runs like a life force through this book, in which every sentence is chiseled exactly."
--Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile
"So smart, so visceral, so sexy . . . absolutely brilliant."
--Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women
"Carolyn Cooke writes with knives and feathers. She slices into her subjects so we see the insides of them and she dusts off the everyday covering to reveal the true contours beneath. Her Daughters of the Revolution is bristling with smarts. Read it slowly and savor the gift this author gives her readers: fierce intelligence, sly humor and not a moment of missing the folly in life."
-Susan Minot, author of Rapture
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