Description: "Sonie Marburg gazes across the bay at Boston's gleaming State House and dreams of escaping form her childhood home, a cobbler's shack echoing with the recriminations of her beautiful Russian mother. All her hopes seem to come true when a summer visitor, Miss Pride, whisks her off to the shadowy libraries and gilded salons of Beacon Hill. But Sonie finds that she is doomed to remain forever an outsider, hovering on the fringes of a privileged world"--
Review Quotes: "Forty years after [Stafford's] death, her sentences still gleam like knives. . . . In Stafford, there is the kingdom of childhood in all its taboos--its furtiveness and griminess. . . . Here is the fury of children. . . . Here is the full range of their dark knowledge." --Parul Seghal, The New York Times
"Boston Adventure, Stafford's debut, is like Charlotte Brontë's Villette, a raw depiction of female isolation." --Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air "Stafford is not interested in flattering our sensibilities. . . . She has a remarkable ability to balance lacerating irony with a very plangent pathos." --Garth Greenwell "Boston Adventure stands as a textbook example of formal dexterity and invention. . . . Sentence for sentence, Boston Adventure is as beautifully composed as any American novel I have ever read." --Scott Bradfield, Los Angeles Times"Stafford . . . studiously recreates a certain idea of literary Boston, replete with the flavour of Henry James and William Dean Howells." --Dennis Zhou, The Times Literary Supplement