And Ladies of the Club; by Helen Hooven Santmyer.

A small town in Ohio, and its intimate inhabitants as they grow when the nations is still young, and some immigrants still speak their original languages from Europe other than English with their children who are second or third generation of the nation.

The girls grow up and form a club reading books together, and grow together in their minds while they have growing families and the children grow, mirroring their parents' lives in kaleidoscopic patterns.

Fascinating, in spite of its calm and rather comparatively uneventful life. Would it that we all had such lives of serene growth! One wonders how much of this is the writer's own life. It is not possible to bring into your writing what you don't have within you.