Thursday's Child

by Faith Baldwin

Book by Faith baldwin

Genres: Romance

218 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1976

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

[Saralyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't decide at first whether or not I liked Baldwin's style of writing, but it really grew on me and became very cozy. I really liked her characters as they seemed very real to me. No one was too good or too bad. People conversed in a realistic fashion. I liked this book, especially from its character perspective.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a cozy story, and I mean pretty much zero tension in terms of plot points, this is a perfect fit.

The problems I had probably all come from the fact that I’m a 21st century middle aged woman reading a story about new, upper middle-class suburbanites in maybe the early 70s. There are all the old gender roles being followed strictly, but also really odd -to me- customs and vocabulary that I assume must have been in that time and place. Sometimes the metaphors and vagueries were SO subtle/vague, it took me a minute to figure out what was actually being said. But the main gist of the story gets across and I did laugh out loud at a few turns of phrase. But for who I am and what the world is now, I mostly just read it as an anthropologist.