A friend with great taste specifically recommended the audio version of this to me and I could not listen to it fast enough—I folded so much laundry and got the kitchen sparkling clean so I could listen to just one more chapter, over and over again. Hildy Good has lived all her life in the small town of Wendover, Massachusetts. She's 60 years old, divorced, a successful realtor. And she drinks—a lot, and the situation is getting out of control. Only Hildy doesn't see it that way. A quiet drama with terrific, fleshed-out characters and an entertaining, thoroughly untrustworthy narrator.

From the publisher: "From New York Times best-selling author Ann Leary comes the captivating story of a wealthy but unconventional New England family, told from the perspective of a reclusive 29-year-old who has a secret (and famous) life on the Internet."

The story is set in 1927 at the (fictional) Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, a public institution that removes "unfit" women from society during their childbearing years to prevent them from birthing similarly "unfit" children. (Leary was inspired by her grandmother, who worked at such an institution for a time.) Our narrator is 18-year-old Mary Engle, who takes a job at Nettleton and quickly grows to idolize her boss, a physician, suffragist, community pillar, and unapologetic advocate of eugenics. Engle believes in Nettleton's mission, until she encounters a childhood friend who Mary knows to be bright and kind, and who claims she was wrongly institutionalized simply because her husband wanted to be rid of her. This realization ultimately prompts a crisis of conscience for Mary, but how can she question her powerful boss and the institution she's built? Stirring, timely, and highly listenable, as narrated by Laura Benanti.