Sweet Clover: A Romance of the White City

Chicago, 1893. The White City rises on the shores of Lake Michigan, a shimmering vision of the future built for eight glorious months. Against this backdrop of wonder and ambition, sixteen-year-old Clover Bryant faces a choice no girl should have to make. Her father is dead. Her mother is an invalid. Three younger siblings depend on her. When the elderly and unexpectedly kind Mr. Van Tassel offers her security, Clover accepts a marriage of convenience that will save her family. But then she meets Jack, the old man's son, newly graduated from college and burning with restless desire. What begins as a practical arrangement becomes a tangle of conflicting loyalties: duty versus passion, gratitude versus longing, the crushing weight of poverty versus the unbearable luxury of wanting. Burnham writes with sharp wit and keen observation about the particular cruelty of a world where love and practicality cannot coexist, where a young woman's innocence is both her currency and her tragedy. The World's Fair glitters outside while inside, lives are being rearranged. A romance suffused with the particular melancholy of choices made too soon, under too much pressure, in a world that offers young women few alternatives.