One Sunday Morning - Hardcover

*Starred Review* If Ephron has yet to establish a devoted readership--she has written two stiletto-precise historical novels (A Cup of Tea, 1997, and White Rose,1999)--her third should certainly do the trick. It meets the beautiful standards set by its predecessors; all of them are presented in brief but not undeveloped chapters, are told in language mesmerizing for its simultaneous punch and brevity, and provide sharply drafted pictures of social conventions and out-of-bounds romantic entanglements in the U.S. of yesterday. The time period Ephron has selected here is the 1920s; her chosen settings are New York and Paris. It's the Jazz Age in cities where old traditions still rise, as imposing as the mansions lining Fifth Avenue, but also where new views and different modes of behavior have blossomed in the wake of the recent world war. Through the prism of the lives of four well-heeled, socially connected women friends, Ephron casts a subtle drama arising from this conflict between old behavior and new, as scandal threatens to ruin the reputation of one of the women. This is Edith Wharton territory, and although it is not rendered quite as profoundly as the work of that master, it is, perhaps, rendered more sprucely, in a style more compelling to contemporary readers. Brad Hooper
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