The Inn at Lake Devine

It's 1962 and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge. In this beguiling novel, Elinor Lipman charts her heroine's fixation with a small bastion of genteel anti-Semitism, a fixation that will have wildly unexpected consequences on her romantic life. As Natalie tries to enter the world that has excluded her--and succeeds through the sheerest of accidents--The Inn at Lake Devine becomes a delightful and provocative romantic comedy full of sparkling social mischief.

Elinor Lipman is the author of seven books: the novels <b>The Pursuit of Alice Thrift</b>, <b>The Dearly Departed</b>, <b>The Ladies' Man</b>, <b>The Inn at Lake Devine</b>, <b>Isabel's Bed</b>, <b>The Way Men Act</b>, <b>Then She Found Me</b>, and a collection of stories, <b>Into Love and Out Again</b>. She has been called "the diva of dialogue" (<i>People</i>) and  "the last urbane romantic" (<i>Chicago Tribune</i>). <i>Book Magazine</i> said of <b>The Pursuit of Alice Thrift</b>,  "Like Jane Austen,  the past master of the genre, Lipman isn't only out for laughs. She serves up social satire, too, that's all the more  trenchant for being deftly drawn."<br> <br>Her essays have appeared