Book cover of Joy Street

Book description

A young woman brought up in a Brahmin family on Beacon Hill falls in love with a man from a very different background.

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Why read it?

1 author picked Joy Street as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Keyes was a journalist (she died in 1970), and her background informed every novel she wrote. 

Joy Street is set primarily in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. At the time I read this book, I had never been to Boston. When I finally visited that city several years later, her descriptions of the area in and around Beacon Hill still were so vivid in my mind that I felt as though I already knew the neighbourhood intimately.

Keyes had an equally deft hand with character development and plot. Joy Street is a book populated with characters that seem real…

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On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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