The Hazards of Good Breeding, Jessica Shattuck
The Hazards of Good Breeding, Jessica Shattuck
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The Hazards of Good Breeding

Author: Jessica Shattuck

Narrator: Suzanne Elise Freeman

Unabridged: 11 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/17/2017

Categories: Fiction, Family Life


Synopsis

This "richly appointed and generously portrayed" (Kirkus Reviews) debut novel tells the story of a WASPy, old-Boston family coming face to face with an America much larger than the one it was born in.

Caroline Dunlap has written off the insular world of the Boston deb parties, golf club luaus, and WASP weddings that she grew up with. But when she reluctantly returns home after her college graduation, she finds that not everything is quite as predictable, or protected, as she had imagined. Her father, the eccentric, puritanical Jack Dunlap, is carrying on stoically after the breakup of his marriage, but he can't stop thinking of Rosita, the family housekeeper he fired almost six months ago. Caroline's little brother, Eliot, is working on a giant papier-mâché diorama of their town—or is he hatching a plan of larger proportions?

As the real reason for Rosita's departure is revealed, the novel culminates in a series of events that assault the fragile, sheltered, and arguably obsolete world of the Dunlaps.

Opening a window into a family's repressed desires and fears, The Hazards of Good Breeding is a startlingly perceptive comedy of manners that heralds a new writer of dazzling talent.

About Jessica Shattuck

Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle, The Hazards of Good Breeding (a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award), and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Shattuck now lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Rebecca

God, this book was so boring. So much description about nothing. Rich people are sooo annoying when nothing interesting happens. And nothing interesting happened AT ALL in this book. Daughter comes back to her dad's big house in the country after finishing college at Harvard. She now has no directio......more

Goodreads review by Kate.

Like so much in life, this novel's success rests on a single condom. If you make it to the condom (page 170), you're money -- and you'll long remember this book's insight into isolation and social constructs. If you don't make it to the condom, it's over -- because you'll put the book down one day a......more

Goodreads review by Emi

This story took a while to crescendo, but boy once it got going, it was super well-orchestrated. Dysfunctional Boston Brahmins the Dunlops are headed by introverted father Jack who has alienated the rest of the family - ex-wife Faith is a quivering puddle of recovery in NYC, daughter Caroline is hom......more

Goodreads review by Pamk

Another book about a dysfunctional family but this one's saving grace was the beauty of the prose and the great characterizations. It's a story of a marriage that has ended, the mother after suffering a mental breakdown, has left her family and moved to New York, and the rest of the family trying t......more