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Content snapshot
Flag an inaccuracy →What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.
Violence
Barely any
Mild; the violence of exclusion and its consequences
Language
Barely any
Mild language
Sexual Content
Barely any
Brief adult content across three generations
Substance Use
Some
Significant; the WASP social world involves drinking across all eras
Emotional Intensity
A lot
Significant; the moral weight of inherited privilege, antisemitism, and the psychological cost of a family that never examined its foundations
What this book is about
Sarah Blake's multigenerational novel follows the Miltons, a WASP family with a Maine island compound, from the 1930s — when a patriarch makes a fateful, ugly choice about who will and won't be welcome — through the present, when the island's inheritance forces a reckoning with what that choice set in motion. Blake's ambitious saga about privilege, antisemitism, and what Americans pass down without examining is one of the most substantive family novels of recent years.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Antisemitism themes
Privilege and its moral costs
Multigenerational reckoning
Reader Verification
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