Holiday Sale! Get an annual membership for 20% off!

Book Summary and Reviews of Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • May 2014, 400 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Suspenseful and cinematic, Bittersweet exposes the gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider's hunger to belong.

On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful, wild, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century; it's the kind of place where children twirl sparklers across the lawn during cocktail hour. Mabel falls in love with midnight skinny-dipping, the wet dog smell that lingers near the yachts, and the moneyed laughter that carries across the still lake while fireworks burst overhead. Before she knows it, she has everything she's ever wanted:  friendship, a boyfriend, access to wealth, and, most of all, for the first time in her life, the sense that she belongs.

But as Mabel becomes an insider, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact - and what they might do to anyone who threatens them. Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family's dark secrets and make Ev's world her own. 

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Beverly-Whittemore has crafted a page-turner riddled with stubborn clues, a twisty plot and beguiling characters." - Kirkus

"As the increasingly tragic story unfolds, the taste left in the reader's mouth is more likely to be sour than bittersweet." - Publishers Weekly

"A slightly wordy but suspenseful tale of corruption and bad behavior among wealthy New Englanders. Readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories featuring dark secrets that affect generations will find much that appeals here." - Library Journal

"Evokes Gone Girl with its exploration of dark secrets and edge-of-your-seat twists." - Entertainment Weekly

"In its guise as a coming-of-age mystery, the book is both swift and arresting; that the novel also doubles as an insightful meditation on class, aspiration, and longing makes the book reverberate in the reader long past its final line." - Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia

"Gripping, beguiling and beautifully written, Bittersweet is a page turner that chills as it intoxicates." - Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man and Blue Plate Special

"Part coming-of-age story, part riveting mystery, Bittersweet is a tantalizing tale of an outsider thrust into a glittering world of immense privilege and suspect morals." - Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia

This information about Bittersweet was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cathryn Conroy

This Is the Quintessential Page-Turner (READ IT!)
Warning: Do not start reading this book unless you have hours and hours to read. It will suck you in and not let go, and your planned schedule will fly out the window.

Girl No. 1, Genevra (Ev for short), comes from a New York family that is wildly wealthy in money, real estate and art. It is not only a world of privilege, but also a world of family, love and values. (Or so it seems.) Girl No. 2, Mabel, comes from a poor, dysfunctional family in Oregon, and she is harboring lots of secrets about them. The two young women are assigned as roommates at a tony East Coast women's college (which Mabel is attending on full scholarship). Until a series of events occur in February of their freshman year, Ev is oblivious to Mabel's existence--even though they live together in a small room. That bonding entices Ev to invite Mabel to spend the summer with her family at their palatial lakeside compound in Vermont. And then the action kicks into high gear as Mabel discovers the dark underbelly of this moneyed dynasty--from shocking sexual secrets to reprehensible financial schemes.

Written by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, "Bittersweet" is part thriller, part romance and part women's fiction, this book is the quintessential page-turner. Read it! But save it for when you can really READ and not just skim a few pages at a time.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the author of three novels, including The Effects of Light and Set Me Free, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best book of fiction by an American woman published in 2007. A recipient of the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, she lives and writes in Brooklyn and Vermont.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    "I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been ...
  • Book Jacket: Everything We Never Had
    Everything We Never Had
    by Randy Ribay
    Francisco Maghabol has recently arrived in California from the Philippines, eager to earn money to ...
  • Book Jacket: The Demon of Unrest
    The Demon of Unrest
    by Erik Larson
    In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Who Said...

Read the best books first...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.