Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine

Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine

Fin & Lady

by Cathleen Schine

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • Jul 2013, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

It's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady - giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free - is as much his responsibility as he is hers.

So begins Fin & Lady, the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the '60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War p Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself.

From a writer The New York Times has praised as "sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting," Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Schine writes lively dialogue and excels at sensory detail, especially early on, before the plot becomes predictable, as the novel wavers precariously between satiric comedy-of-manners and something more serious." - Publishers Weekly

"Schine offers up a bittersweet lemon soufflé of family love and romantic passion." - Kirkus

"A wise, clever, tenderly delivered novel about learning the ways of the world." - Barnes and Noble

This information about Fin & Lady was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cathryn Conroy

I Loved This Book! Tender and Sweet, Bold and Brash…and Parts of It Are Hilarious.
Oh, I loved this book! Tender and sweet, but also bold and brash. And parts of it are hilarious.

It's the spring of 1964. Fin Hadley is a happy 11-year-old boy who lives on a farm in Connecticut until his widowed mother dies, and he is suddenly an orphan. His only living relative is a 24-year-old half-sister named Lady Hadley, a rich woman living in a posh apartment in New York City with a full-time maid/cook named Mabel. Lady is stunningly beautiful, sometimes cruel, completely unpredictable, and often inattentive, but also kind, tender, and charming. She quickly drives to rural Connecticut in her turquoise-colored convertible Karmann Ghia to retrieve her new charge. Fin moves into Lady's posh high-rise apartment with his dog, Gus, and the two adapt amazingly well. Since there are only two months left in the school year, Lady declines to enroll him, spending their days instead exploring the city, eating ice cream for lunch, and having a wonderful time.

And then the honeymoon is over. Lady resents living in a gilded cage, so they move to the bohemian Greenwich Village, along with the wonderful Mabel, into a half-furnished townhouse and set up housekeeping there. Lady charges Fin with finding her a husband. Three suitors, only one of whom is acceptable to Fin, parade through Lady's life as this free spirit is determined to be married by the time she is 25. Lady may be Fin's legal guardian, but it is Fin who slowly begins to take care of Lady as much as she takes care of him. True to her capricious nature, Lady secretly runs away on her 28th birthday, April 1, 1968, and she takes with her the love and security of Fin's life.

This is also a salute to the turbulent 1960s—from the beatniks to the Vietnam draft. Try as she might, Lady is out of touch with the times, being more a debutante at heart than a hippie.

Written by Cathleen Schine, this heartwarming novel has its surprises, beginning with the mysterious narrator. (Don't waste time trying to figure out who it is…all will be revealed in due time, and when it is, well, it's perfect.) This is a smart, sassy, and delightful story about what it means to be a family even if it doesn't fit the traditional definition. As characters, Fin and Lady are each exquisitely described, so much so that they seem like real people with their little quirks and habits. Adding to the magic, the dialogue is pitch-perfect.

And, oh, the ending…it is the happiest saddest ending I have ever read.

Insightful and perceptive, this novel is not only a pleasure to read, but also brilliantly captures an unconventional meaning of family that filled my heart with love.

Demanding Reader

A real pleasure!
This latest from Schine has all the qualities
Of her best work; humor, some deftly written, great characters, wonderful period detail. But this novel also pulls at the heart throughout. It's a cliche, but I laughed, AND I cried.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Cathleen Schine Author Biography

As a child, Cathleen Schine dreamed of growing up to become a graduate student. Years later, her childhood ambitions were realized when she entered the University of Chicago's graduate program in medieval history. There, it was noticed that she had no memory for names, dates or abstract ideas, and she was thus forced, tragically, to abandon her life-long dream. Before this disappointment, however, while on a fellowship studying paleography in Italy, Schine made an important discovery: she liked to buy shoes. So when the welcome of academia was rescinded, Schine was able to pursue a career in this area which was rewarding but short-lived, as she could not get a job. In debt and increasingly desperate, Schine turned to the lucrative world of free-lance writing. Having failed as an ...

... Full Biography
Link to Cathleen Schine's Website

Other books by Cathleen Schine at BookBrowse

5 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don'...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.