A Well Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler
★★★ I am more conflicted writing this review than any review in recent memory. I enjoy historical fiction. I enjoy strong women. I love listening to a story sometimes as opposed to reading. It can add a whole extra layer of pleasure. I found the book to be well paced and the prose to be good. A Well Behaved Woman has all of those qualities but where Ms. Fowler has imagined conversations and details the book becomes flawed and at times outright offensive. In the first few chapters, then Alva Smith is portrayed as the only compassionate girl among her peers, offering assistance to tenement dwellers while her classmates carp about having to be exposed to the lower classes. In this scene, even the tenement girl Alva is assisting is portrayed as rude for declining money offered after the death of her sister. That scene is referenced three or four more times throughout the book turning on the phrase "money's no help." Each time it's referenced it is used t...