Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

Nobody really stepped up to defend to the Dutch House at our last meeting. Interestingly, no one argued that Patchett couldn't write -- we all agreed that passages of description and moments of character were well rendered and pretty in parts. Our issue with the Dutch House was about the plot and most importantly the choice of narrator. Danny as a character is a walking embodiment of privilege. While he and his sister Maeve are betrayed by their foster mother on the death of their father and denied their inheritence and their family home (the aforementioned Dutch House), Danny still gets a trust to put him through medical school, and has enough capital to buy property in Harlem and become a land owner. But Patchett seems to be asking us to care that they lost the House the entire story, and we just couldn't get there when Danny and Maeve are effectively raiding the trust to get as much money as possible. Danny never thinks about what Maeve needs, or how being a white landlord buying up land in Harlem is problematic, or even what the lives of his childhood servants were. Now, there's nothing wrong with Danny being unconscious about all that -- there are in fact a lot of good books we've read about unconscious male privilege (Fates and Furies, The Blazing World) -- but it's truer to say that the entire book is blind to it. The two servants aren't actually characters -- all we know about them is that they are sisters, and that the love helping Maeve and Danny so much that they would come to Maeve's independent home to cook for her out of the goodness of their hearts. Maeve's life is sketched for us, and it's fascinating -- she's never married, she works a job that at first seems beneath her but then turns the business into a multistate conglomerate, she has a near reckless attitude about her diabetes -- but Maeve never gets explored or even really glimpsed outside of Danny's perspective. We were actually flabbergasted that Patchett could write such an unaware and uncritical book at this time. Just about everyone agreed that Maeve was an amazing character we wanted to know more about, but Patchett doesn't give us that access. Instead, when the plot resolves with the children's original mother returning, we aren't allowed to see Maeve's desperate desire for family -- we see Danny's cheesy resignation that his mother was just 'too good' for wanting to help people and not comfortable with the house her husband bought for her in a tacky, low class way. And ending the book with Danny's daughter rebuying the house and having a rich kid's party there just makes sure you know for sure that Patchett's story is about the wealthy uncritically dealing with wealth. Perhaps if we read this book 25 years ago, we might have found the evil step-mom turning toothless or the quiet malaise of Danny's medical career until he can finally get back to his true dream of being a landlord, I don't know, sympathetic? Poignent? Moving? But in this privilege conscious world we currently live in, the Dutch House looks less like a powerful metaphor of longing and missed expectation and more like a giant eyesore of wealth that's wrongly and completely uncritically worshipped.