Invitation to the Waltz

Scanning my shelves for something short and fun, I figured this was a safe bet. Set in England between the World Wars, it focuses on that perennial set-piece from the past two centuries—a girl’s “coming out” into society. What I wasn’t expecting was that a novel that takes place almost entirely over a single night could express so much: the classist and sexist underpinnings of the ritual ball, the generational destruction of WW1, and the idea that human-being-ness is so varied that it almost defies the label of a single species. Lehmann’s unbuttoned style creates a humorous, but not frivolous, sensibility and oddly lovable characters. She must have known she had a winning heroine with Olivia Curtis—whose vast reserves of empathy cause as much awkwardness as insight—because she wrote another book that catches up with Olivia after a decade out in the wide world. (And I’ve already got it for when I need a sure thing.)