Day of Fate

A burned-out New York night editor flees the city for rest, but rest is the last thing fate has in mind. Wrenched from a breakdown by a train that deposits him at a rural Quaker household, he arrives just in time to save the family from a lightning strike that sets their barn ablaze. Grateful and healing, he finds himself drawn to Elwood, the daughter of the house, who happens to be betrothed to another man. What follows is a Victorian romance of longing, patience, and the peculiar cruelty of loving someone already promised to another. Roe's novel captures a specific 19th-century pleasure: watching a reserved man fall impossibly, uncomfortably in love. It's frothy, it's contrived, and it knows it. The prose crackles with the energy of someone who genuinely believes in fate, in Providence, in the idea that the right person will arrive exactly when the universe decides it's time.