Eras in the past had a focus on manners — a word that in itself was a code for something more controlling. For her novel The Doxies Penalty, author Madeleine E. Robins revisits a past era to look what maneuvers behind the manners, a thing much more interesting and possibly more sinister.

MADELEINE E. ROBINS:

One of the tasks adolescents face is trying to parse the rules of the world they live in — and the potential penalties. Not the say-thank-you or don’t-kill-people rules, but the s...