Patty and Azalea

Patty Fairfield #17

by Carolyn Wells

Patty's husband's cousin Azalea is a wild western girl, and brings chaos when she comes east for a visit.

Genres: Fiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Carolyn Wells was a prolific writer for over 40 years and was especially noted for her humor, and she was a frequent contributor of nonsense verse and whimsical pieces to such little magazines as Gelett Burgess' The Lark, the Chap Book, the Yellow Book, and the Philistine.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Alisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, Patty has been married for just over a year now, and she has a baby that she adores, and she has an enormous house to which she is delighted to constantly invite her friends. She decides she'd like to know something more of her husband's family, and she invites the only relative he has left...a young girl cousin that he only remembers as a baby. The girl is named Azalea, and when she comes, Patty is really in for a rude awakening. Azalea has no manners to speak of and is brazen and opinionated and almost impossible to curb. She's also secretive. Further distress ensues when Patty finds that Azalea is taking the baby out for mysterious walks without permission.
Patty's married life is very happy and nice to read about, and I'm glad that some of her old friends make a reappearance, and one more loose end gets wrapped up (that is, one more person in her circle gets engaged), but this didn't quite feel like a "last" book in a series. For one thing, I wish that a few more of her closer friends had come back and/or gotten some sort of closure or happy ending. Also, I find it kind of bizarre that her loving father and stepmother have been so hands-off after she got engaged and married. In this book she even remarks that because they're out traveling in California, they haven't even seen the baby yet. Weird! When she's the darling only child, it's definitely odd that they can bear to be parted from her and their new grandchild. But instead Patty's life and "family" seem to consist mostly of her peer group. Granted, even when she was a teenager she spent an awful lot of time at other people's houses, but her father and stepmother were still there at the crucial moments.
Anyway, that's it for the Patty books. They were fun, they were light, they were happy. There were occasionally some eye-roll moments, but they were also pretty clever in spots. They have some "character" to them, and deserve more recognition with other famous girls' books.

[hhertzof · Rating 4 out of 5]

So we've skipped through the beginning of her marriage and her pregnancy and now she has a little baby with a twee name who is adorable at the right times but mostly left to the nanny. Most of this book deals with her husband's only living relative who's come to stay (and who isn't quite in their social class, but somehow being from the West makes everything okay). And here endeth the reread of the 1900's version of Gossip Girls.

[Erika Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. I saw the ending coming long before it did and I wondered why Patty and Bill didn't. Also I wanted to meet Azalea ... And the uncle. I wonder what happened to Ken and Elise. Patty's good character remains...

[Kirstin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's entertaining to see how quickly the cultural mores of this period changed by reading this type of fiction aimed at young girls.