Scarcely has The Carriage House, Louisa Hall's first novel, begun when patriarch William Adair suffers a stroke at the neighborhood tennis club. He awakes to find his three daughters--Elizabeth, Diana and Izzy--clustered around his bedside, along with his longstanding neighbor Adelia Lively. None of them, though, strike William as the "golden girls" he's adored all his life: Elizabeth is divorced; Diana has dropped out of architecture school one defense away from her Ph.D.; Izzy, who struggles with her mother Margaux's ever-progressing dementia, has become someone her father hardly recognizes at all. And while Adelia's management of the Adair family home and her efforts to save the family's historic carriage house from demolition provides a semblance of structure, the neighborhood sees her as a desperate, grasping spinster intent on installing herself in Margaux's abandoned position as William's wife.
Like Jane Austen's Persuasion, The Carriage House is a finely detailed exploration of human relationships amid the loss and rediscovery of oneself. None of the Adairs, in a sense, know who they are; they know only that everything they thought they knew about themselves and one another has collapsed--and, like the carriage house, must be rebuilt if it cannot be saved. Hall's writing is astonishingly clear and sure-footed, with turns of phrase that display her experience as a poet but never drag the reader out of the plot, and her compassion for her characters is profound. A warm and well-written debut. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket