The Guest Book

February 15, 2019
An island off the coast of Maine: Let's buy it, dear."Handsome, tanned, Kitty and Ogden Milton stood ramrod straight and smiling into the camera on the afternoon in 1936 when they had chartered a sloop, sailed out into Penobscot Bay, and bought Crockett's Island." This photo is clipped to a clothesline in the office of professor Evie Milton in the history department at NYU; she found it while cleaning out her mother's apartment after her death. "Since the afternoon in the photograph, four generations of her family had eaten round the table on Crockett's Island, clinked the same glasses, fallen between the same sheets, and heard the foghorn night after night." Evie jokes with an African-American colleague that the photograph represents "the Twilight of the WASPs," then finds herself snappishly defending them. Blake's (The Postmistress, 2010, etc.) third novel studies the unfolding of several storylines over the generations of this family: deaths and losses shrouded in secrecy, terrible errors in judgment, thwarted love--much of it related to or caused by the family's attitudes toward blacks and Jews. While patriarch Ogden Milton presided unflinchingly over his firm's involvement with the Nazis, his granddaughter Evie Milton is married to a Jewish man--who, like any person of his background who has visited Crockett's Island, complains that there's not a comfortable chair in the place. Kitty Milton, the matriarch, twisted by social mores into repressing her tragedies and ignoring her conscience, is a fascinating character, appealing in some ways, pitiable and repugnant in others. Through Kitty and her daughters, Blake renders the details of anti-Semitic prejudice as felt by this particular type of person. Reminiscent of the novels of Julia Glass, the story of the Miltons engages not just with history and politics, but with the poetry of the physical world. "The year wheeled round on its colors. Summer's full green spun to gold then slipping gray and resting, resting white at the bottom of the year...then one day the green whisper, the lightest green, soft and growing into the next day...suddenly, impossibly, it was spring again."This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga--it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society. Its convincing characters and muscular narrative succeed on both counts.

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March 25, 2019
Blake (The Postmistress) tells the history of the privileged Milton family from 1935 to present day in this powerful family saga. In 1935 New York, Kitty Milton, wife of Ogden, is enjoying the life of a New York society wife with her three children—five-year-old Neddy, three-year-old Moss, and one-year-old Joan—when Neddy dies in an accident. To help his wife heal, Ogden buys Crockett’s Island off the coast of Maine, and through the decades, the island becomes the Miltons’ summer refuge. In 1959, Moss is working in his father’s investment bank and invites his Jewish friend Len Levy, a fellow employee at the firm, and Reg Pauling, a black man and friend of Moss and Len, to visit the island. Len and Joan have been secretly dating, but Len isn’t certain if Joan will acknowledge their relationship in front of her family. The tensions of Len and Reg’s visit result in an argument that brings family secrets to light and ends in drama that will haunt those present for years to come. And in the present-day, as Milton family members must decide what to do with their island inheritance, they discover some answers to their family’s past. Blake has a particular knack for dialogue; she knows exactly how to reveal the hidden depths of the characters both through what is said and what is unsaid. The result is potent and mesmerizing.

May 1, 2019

This epic historical tale follows the lives of three generations of New England's wealthy Milton family from the 1930s through the present. However, the novel encompasses much more than the history of one family, as Blake (The Postmistress) also recounts some of America's own growing pains during this period. Delving into politics, race, and the question of what makes a person essentially good, the plot is extremely thought provoking, and the characters make it absorbing. From family patriarch Ogden, purchaser of the island property where the titular guest book is housed, to his children, grandchildren, and friends, all the characters are well rounded and add to the story. VERDICT Blake's well-written sophomore novel will interest her fans. Those who enjoyed Jessica Shattuck's The Women in the Castle, as well as fans of traditional historical fiction, such as Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 11/19/18.]--Elizabeth McArthur, Bexar Cty. Digital Lib., BiblioTech, San Antonio

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
One of those families who used to run the world . . . WASPs. That's how a man describes the Miltons as he admires the grand wreck of their Maine island estate in a brief, shivery foreshadowing. Blake's breathtaking saga then begins in full with a lush, sweeping overture, though it carries its own kind of chilling undertow. Think Gershwin, Copeland, Ellington. It's 1935, spring has suddenly turned Manhattan verdant and promising, and Kitty Milton, 30 and privileged, can't help but quietly revel in her splendid good fortune. Blake sets out the silver of Kitty and her husband's blue-blood pedigrees and Ogden's accomplishments running the family bank. But intercut with Kitty's satisfaction with her perfectly ordered life are scenes of shocking loss and Ogden's business deals in Germany, which lay the foundation for long-concealed family traumas. As in her best-selling The Postmistress (2010), Blake saturates each scene with sensuous and emotional vibrancy while astutely illuminating sensitive moral quandaries. Tacking between the present, in which Kitty and Ogden's grandchildren may not be able to hold onto the Island, which defines their legacy, and the fateful summer of 1959, when the Milton kingdom is infiltrated, thanks to the younger generation, by two inquisitive men, one Jewish, the other African American, Blake deftly interrogates the many shades of prejudice and the ordinary, everyday wickedness of turning away. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Blake's brilliant and ravishing novel promises to hit big, inspiring extensive publicity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)