Minglestreams

by Jane D. Abbott, H. Weston Taylor (Illustrator)

Two recent college graduates want to escape the fences that confine them so spend a summer running an Inn in the Adirondack Mountains. The girls, Jill Gilbert and Hester Browning, are both from socially prominent families. They can't think of anything worse than going back to their town and being forced into marriage by their families. The summer at the Inn turns out to be very enlightening and brings a mystery.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Jane Ludlow Drake Abbott (1879-1962) was an American author who began her career writing for adolescent girls, and went on to write adult romance. Born in Buffalo, New York, to a family involved in the shipbuilding industry of the Great Lakes region, she was educated at Cornell University, and married Buffalo attorney Frank A. Abbott. Most of her twenty juvenile titles were published under the name Jane D. Abbott, although a few were released under the name Jane Abbott. Her adult titles were all released under the name Jane Abbott.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This old book was written in 1923. I picked it up for something different to read and I was pleasantly surprised. For sure the book is a period piece and spouts plenty of socialism ideas of the 1920s. But they actually make the book amusing without meaning to. Hester Browning and Jill Gilbert, two young ladies who recently graduated from college, hope to escape the fences of their socially prominent families that keep them in. With their college housemother, Aunt Saphy, the girls run an Inn in the Adirondack mountains. Here they can do what they want. But into their lives comes a young man who has amnesia. They take him in and he stays to work for them. Both of the girls become fond of him. Meanwhile, the book switches every few chapters back to what is happening at Jill's home with her three sisters scheming to get her engaged to a guy whose grandmother knows her grandmother and who is with the American Embassy in France but is now in the USA on a mission. The book plugs along but all of a sudden it delivers a surprise at the end.