Station Wagon Set

by Faith Baldwin

Sixty miles from any American metropolis - well beyong Suburbia, but not too far from Park Avenue - we find the gay crowd of sophisticates who live in "Little Oxford" or its counterpart. There is Kitty Owen, whom Dan Richards thought he loved, Thalia Holmes, who was tired of the gossip and the unwelcome matchmaking of her friends, Letty Lovemay, Olive Langdon, Beth Kenwood and the others of whose hopes and ambitions Miss Baldwin writes.
Small yellow station wagons take weekend guests to the reclaimed farms, the country states or simple cottages of former city dwellers. And here are their essential lives - happy, sad, tender and brutal.

381 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Nick Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, of course I would read (and absolutely love) a novel entitled “Station Wagon Set.” Anyone who’s taken even the most casual glimpse at my reading list (or, let’s face it, met me briefly) knows I’m crazy for vintage, suburban soapers.

And, for anyone keeping score, this is the second book I’ve read with the word ‘station wagon’ in the title.

More than anything, though, this book solidified my opinion that Faith Baldwin is literature’s best and most prolific author of romantic fiction. Baldwin consistently understood exactly the kind of emotional release and romantic wish-fulfillment readers crave from the genre.

“Station Wagon Set,” is a series of interconnected novellas centered around the swanky suburban village of Little Oxford, located about an hour away from “town.” Marriages, love affairs and romantic rivalries begin and end amid the gossipy social swirl of country club dances, house parties and garden club luncheons.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is like a set of interconnected novellas. Each section, we get to know a different set of people and how their love life turns out. They are each touching in their own way. I would say that the main character it Thalia Holmes, because we spend the most time with her, but she is only a secondary character in some of the sections.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read in 1984.
Old time soap opera novel set in a small town.