'The Servants' Quarters' by Lynn Freed, 'A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, & the End of the '60s' by Robert Greenfield, 'The Halfway House' by Guillermo Rosales

The Servants' Quarters

A Novel

Lynn Freed

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 256 pp., $24

"The Servants' Quarters," a novel of revenge and regret, is written in a most appealing voice -- the wise child in a household of secrets. It's a haunting voice in literature, the child who will take charge of her own destiny and will not be told which rooms she can enter, which she cannot. Cressida is 9 when the novel opens, living in postwar Africa. World War II is a recent nightmare. Miranda, Cressida's older sister, dreams of Germans at night and wakes screaming. Their father was hit in the head with a golf ball and lies in a far room completely inert, cared for by Phineas, an old Zulu. Their mother is determined to hold on to the family's dignity. They run out of money, and Mr. Harding, a wealthy, disfigured RAF pilot, swoops down from his big house on the hill and brings the entire family to live in the servants' quarters above his converted stables. But Cressida, who is, her mother says, selfish and ruthless, struggles not to be enslaved in the myriad ways the world enslaves the poor. "He didn't love us, I could have told her that. I did tell her. I said, 'I don't like him, and I hate his voice, and I don't want to sit next to him anymore.' What I couldn't tell her was that the war was becoming a terror for me, too -- that it had taken the shape of Mr. Harding's scarred, pink, dented head." Cressida's mother feeds her daughter to Mr. Harding, bit by bit, a form of human sacrifice. Hard as she struggles, Cressida is ensnared.

--

A Day in the Life

One Family, the Beautiful People,

& the End of the '60s

Robert Greenfield

DaCapo Press: 338 pp., $24.95

There's a mournful quality to this fascinating book about beautiful people gone down, a feeling that some people have about the '60s. Was it greed that sucked the peace and love generation down the rabbit hole or into the mainstream? Money? Drugs? Was it just a generation trapped in adolescence? Greenfield has chosen two poster kids, though in many ways their extremely wealthy backgrounds disqualify them from providing answers to some of these questions. The money, their beauty and the famous people they hung out with all over the world make them glitter and splutter out. But the same sweet vision of a possible future (peace, love, warlessness) makes us sorry when they fail, money or no.