New Girl in Town

by Faith Baldwin

Maggie Knox is the new girl in Little Oxford, a charming New England town. After the death of her great-aunt Hattie, Maggie arrives from her native Hawaii determined to make a new life for herself in the wonderful antique-filled house Hattie has bequeathed to her. Though Maggie shivers through a cold and snowy winter, homesick for the family she has left behind in a kinder climate, she soon makes new friends. One is her lawyer and the most elgible bachelor for miles who has a penchant for women who are not looking for a permanent relationship. But Maggie is more interested in a married man. Then tragedy strikes and Maggie is confronted with the most difficult situation of her life.

307 pages, Unknown Binding

First published February 1, 1975

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

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I own several volumes of Faith Baldwin's nonfiction essays. They are some of my favorite inspirational books and the writing in them is beautiful, fluent, and profound. So I was quite surprised to find that in her fiction (at least in this book) Baldwin adopted a choppy, fragmented writing style. Besides the awkward sentence structure, the dialogue of her characters was clipped and so flippant that they came across as insincere. It felt so affected to me. My disappointment in the writing had me questioning whether I wanted to seek out any of her other novels, but decided I'd give another book a try because I did enjoy the story. 2.5 stars.

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this book, because I have read and loved others by the same author. But I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters, or their love lives, or their careers, or their health. That made it hard to keep track of them so I had to keep going back to see who 'Jack' and "Edna" (not their real names, ha ha, because I can't remember them) were. The heroine is intolerably spunky and forthright and I disliked her intensely.