Patty Blossom

Patty Blossom captures the giddy, uncertain transition from girlhood to womanhood in an era when the old rules were crumbling and no one was quite sure what new ones to replace them with. Patty Fairfield, recovering from illness and itching for life, escapes to a lakeside cottage during a snowstorm, where she meets the intriguing Sam Blaney and his circle of bohemian artists. Wells writes with sharper eyes than her contemporaries give her credit for: Patty's cheerful adaptability isn't naivety but a kind of survival instinct, a way of keeping pace with a world that demands she choose between respectability and something that feels truer. The artistic circle she falls into isn't disreputable so much as uninterested in the social performances Patty has been taught to give. What follows is less a story of corruption than of awakening - a young woman realizing that the future she'd been promised might not be the one she actually wants. It's a slight, bright novel with more complexity than its cheerful surface suggests, and it remains a vivid portrait of that particular moment when women began to suspect they might be allowed to want more.