Sisters

Cherry Strickland rushes home engaged, bursting with news she can barely contain. But as the Strickland family gathers to celebrate, the youngest daughter finds herself caught between the glow of romance and a mounting dread she cannot name. Martin Lloyd is everything a young woman should want, yet Cherry cannot shake the visceral terror that rises when she thinks of marketing lists, endless household inventories, and the glass berry bowl she will dust for the rest of her life. Her sisters watch with knowing eyes; her father observes with quiet caution. Only cousin Anne seems to understand the panic beneath Cherry's excitement. Published in 1919, Kathleen Thompson Norris crafts a sharp, emotionally precise portrait of a woman standing at the threshold of her own life, terrified to step through. The novel captures something often left unsaid in romances of the era: that marriage, for all its promise, was also a calculation of survival, a negotiation between love and labor, between the self a woman was and the self she might lose. Norris writes with psychological acuity about the gap between what Cherry feels and what she cannot say, between the celebration around her and the silence of her private fears. For readers who savor early feminist literature and stories about women who love bravely but doubt wisely.