November 6, 2023
Watts (Quiver) depicts a clandestine sapphic affair in small-town 1950s Kentucky in her appealing latest. Samuel is in a marriage of convenience with her gay former English professor. They live with his mother and are waited on by a Black housekeeper named Priscilla. After Frances moves to town with her husband, who takes a job in the college’s English department, Samuel and Frances bond over being different than the “hen party” of other departmental wives. Frances invites Samuel to lunch, where they regale each other with childhood stories. When Samuel touches Frances’ forearm, it’s “as if Samuel’s touch had glued her to the spot.” What follows is a love affair that grows torrid behind closed doors and then bubbles over to threaten their marriages and their reputations in town. Though Watts relies heavily on familiar Southern tropes—Priscilla serves “pickles and chowchow and preserves” next to a “sweating glass pitcher of iced tea”—she gets readers invested in her motley assemblage of queer characters and their struggles with a hostile world. Watts’s earnest story goes down easy.