Samantha at Saratoga

Samantha at Saratoga is Marietta Holley's wickedly funny portrait of a woman who decides her husband needs a vacation, specifically at the fashionable Saratoga Springs, whether he wants one or not. Samantha Allen is a force of nature: practical, chatty, certain she's always right, and completely undeterred by Josiah's complaints about the expense, the corns on his feet, or his general reluctance to go anywhere that isn't their farm. As the pair make their way to this gilded resort, Samantha dispenses sharp opinions on hotel managers, fellow guests, and the absurd rituals of the leisure class, all while Holley skewers the pretensions of late nineteenth-century American high society with a precision that would make Mark Twain proud. The humor is dry, the observations are incisive, and Samantha's absolute confidence in her own worldview even when she's wildly off-base is endlessly entertaining. This is a novel about small-town perspectives colliding with big-city pretension, about marriage as eternal negotiation, and about the particular pleasure of watching an unmovable woman navigate a world that thinks it knows better than she does.