The Happiest Time of Their Lives
Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. In the beautifully appointed drawing room of a New York brownstone, a young girl waits for a boy she met at a dance the night before, and the reader is drawn into the exquisite torture of young love: the trembling hope, the paralyzing doubt, the way a single afternoon can feel like the whole of existence. Alice Duer Miller captures something achingly true about the first flutter of romance, the way a young heart can swing from desperate despair to incandescent joy in the span of a doorbell's ring. But this is no simple love story. The room itself is a character, filled with beautiful objects older than the house, presided over by a mother who understands that life is a performance and the stage must be set just so. Against the backdrop of wealthy 1920s New York, Mathilde must navigate not just her own feelings but the invisible rules of courtship, the expectations of family, the social choreography of young women and the men they hope to attract. It is a portrait of innocence that knows it is performing innocence, of desire shaped by convention, of that fragile moment when a girl is just beginning to learn the games adults play.
