A great story, very hard to put down but just a bit too long for a one-sitting read which it deserves. It concerns a rich American family with parental and financial secrets. Our narrator, Mabel, is not of their world. She comes from a poor background and is a college chum of the daughter. She is invited to spend the summer with the extended family on their luxurious estate. It is the patriarch’s sister who approaches Mabel to expose her monstrous brother for she believes the Van Gogh in the main house to be hers. She gives Mabel an old diary where, she says, the truth lies. The diary goes back to the 1920s and there are a lot of ‘truths’ to expose! Great stuff. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
One perfect family. Too many perfect lies. In every glossy picture of the American society pages, there's an Ev Winslow. Disarmingly beautiful, and - naturally - tall, athletic, with a smile that's perfect. Small-town Mabel Dagmar has never known anyone like Ev, and now she's sharing her college dorm - even if she is completely ignored. But suddenly they're friends and Mabel can hardly believe her luck when she finds herself summering at the Winslow family's luxurious estate, Winloch, in Vermont. Winloch is like a small village, with each of the perfect Winslow children inhabiting a pretty white cottage. Days spent swimming in watery coves evaporate into nights at glamorous cocktail parties where Mabel sits alongside the scions and the fountainhead of this prestigious family. And as the formality melts away with one particular Winslow brother, Mabel is left to think that her summer has all but become a golden dream. But when Mabel meets a disgruntled member of the family, she can't help looking a little closer at the Winslows, probing beneath their glossy exterior. And what she uncovers in their past is almost as shocking as what she finds out about their present. Beneath the beauty is a rotten core. And not everyone is quite as they seem.
'Evokes Gone Girl with its exploration of dark secrets and edge-of-your-seat twists' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
'Gripping, beguiling and beautifully written... a page turner that chills as it intoxicates. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore has created a family so dangerously enthralling that the more we learn of their greed and bloodlust, the more we aspire to belong' KATE CHRISTENSEN, PEN
/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man and Blue Plate Special 'Part coming-of-age story, part riveting mystery, Bittersweet is a tantalizing tale of an outsider thrust into a glittering world of immense privilege and suspect morals. With a narrator torn between uncovering one family's dark secrets and protecting her own, Bittersweet brilliantly explores the complicated question of what price any of us would pay to seize the life of our dreams KIMBERLY MCCREIGHT, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia
Author
About Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the author of three novels, including The Effects of Light and Set Me Free, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, for the best book of fiction by an American woman published in 2007. A recipient of the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, she lives and writes in Brooklyn and Vermont.
