Introduction

"A timely, sophisticated tale [that] explores what happens when a charmed life loses its luster.” –O Magazine

From the award-winning author of No One Is Here Except All of Us, an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and '70s that suddenly loses its fortune—and its bearings.

One of Best Books of Summer –O Magazine
One of The 12 Summer Books That Everyone Will Be Talking About –Harper’s Bazaar
One of 20 Books Perfect for Your Summer Vacay –Refinery29
One of 22 Summer Books You Won’t Want to Miss –Huffington Post
One of 19 Summer Books that Everyone Will be Talking About – Elle.com
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2016 –The Millions
One of 30 Best New Books for Summer 2016 –Good Housekeeping
One of 30 Books You Should Read this Summer –Chicago Tribune

Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar—married with three children—are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money. More specifically, there's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals. Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever, in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine.

Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility, approached by award-winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of June 2016: It’s hard to describe this novel clearly. It’s a fable, it’s an ultra-realistic look at the class system in America, it’s a love story and it’s a period piece. Set in the 1960s and 70s, ‘Sons and Daughters’ begins straightforwardly enough: a privileged young wife and mother learns from her family lawyer that all of their wealth is gone. But if from that you expect a straightforward story of a couple facing the ultimate of “first world problems,” a la The Nest--and I kind of did--you will be plenty surprised. Adrift and confused, Fern and Edgar each wander off into their own fantasy worlds: he (of course) with a neighborhood Siren; she, more imaginatively, with a giant she met while impersonating a bride at an old folks’ home. (Yes, that’s what I said.) Their young children, meanwhile, are accidentally left alone for days and get up to the kind of gentle trouble last found in old-fashioned fairy tales or maybe a Shakespeare comedy. See what I mean? It sounds silly. And yet, thanks to Ausubel’s dreamlike prose and her careful parsing of the magical realism--think Alice Hoffman not Gabriel Garcia Marquez--the novel opens into a magical force field that even doubters somehow can’t manage to escape. --Sara Nelson, The Amazon Book Review

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