In 1890s New England, eighteen-year-old Daisy McDonald makes a choice that will define her life: she marries Guy Thornton, a wealthy man twice her age, after a whirlwind courtship. Through the overlapping perspectives of Frances Thornton, Guy's watchful sister, and the private diaries of both Daisy and Guy himself, Mary Jane Holmes constructs a devastating portrait of a marriage built on unequal footing. Frances, skeptical from the first of Daisy's youth and frivolous charm, records her concerns in diary entries that double as accusation and prophecy. Daisy, eager and unprepared, finds herself trapped in a household where her beauty is a threat and her inexperience a crime. What begins as unease curdles into something darker: the slow recognition that love, without maturity or mutual respect, can become a cage. Holmes, the second-bestselling American author of her era, writes with sharp eye for the domestic cruelties that pass as propriety, and Miss McDonald remains a piercing examination of what women lost when marriage was their only career.
