Margot

In the mid-1950s, Margot Thornsen divides her childhood between a Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue and her family's grand country house in Oyster Bay. Her late grandfather's steel fortune is meant to pass to her, and her future seems fixed before she has any say in it.

Her mother has other plans. She wants Margot to give up further education and marry into a suitable match. Margot, however, cares far more about microscopes, beetles and books, and those private passions pull her away from the life her family has laid out.

A ruinous fire topples the family's fortune and standing just as the sexual revolution begins to reshape American life. That upheaval opens an unexpected route to Radcliffe College in the late 1960s, where Margot finds the intellectual, cultural and personal freedom she has been reaching toward.

Wendell Steavenson's novel looks closely at the unspoken unhappiness of young women in that era, tracks a sharp and often funny conflict between mother and daughter, and portrays one woman's devotion to the wonders of science.