Publisher's Synopsis
For fans of Meg Wolitzer's THE WIFE and Chloe Benjamin's THE IMMORTALISTS, THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN is an engrossing multi-vocal story of grief, identity, and belonging, set on the campus of an elite all-men's college in 1970, amid protests against the Vietnam war, calls for co-education, and the rise of the feminist movement.
It's late 1970 when Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard. Oliver was a history professor at Clarendon, an elite men's college with just four women on the faculty, and though his widow Virginia initially carried Oliver's prejudices against these outspoken, never-married women--dubbed The Gang of Four--she begins to depend on them in the wake of his death, and soon she finds herself joining their work to bring the women's movement--and coeducation--to Clarendon.Meanwhile, Virginia's daughter Rebecca is adrift in a world without her dad and no longer recognizes the woman her mother is becoming. On campus, junior Sam Waxman, also reeling from the death of his favorite professor, allows a crush on a female-guest-student-turned-activist to draw him into her radical orbit. Paths converge one fraught night at a Clarendon frat party, where Sam's entanglement in a badly planned anti-war action threatens Virginia's newfound identity--and puts much more at stake for Rebecca.
Told through alternating perspectives The Wrong Kind of Woman is a thoughtful, engrossing story of grief and renewal, of shedding old identities and finding new ways to belong, beautifully woven against the backdrop of the rapid changes of the early Seventies.
