A Matter of Happiness
I am a new fan of Tori Whitaker. This witty and engaging story is about Melanie, an up-and-coming executive in the whiskey business in Louisville, Kentucky, and her “Grape Aunt Violet.” When Melanie’s great-great-aunt Violet died, she left her 1923 Jordan Playboy car to Melanie as an inheritance. Deciding whether to sell, Melanie finds the interior is full of hidey holes—convenient for a car built in the Prohibition era. She also finds a journal in a pocket. Aunt Violet has left a note inside for her, as if she knew one day Melanie would find it. Through the journal, we see Violet learning to live her life as an independent woman in 1920s Detroit.
Violet struggles with many of the same issues today’s women struggle with. Working woman or married? Family vs. career? Why should one have to sacrifice one for the other? Violet learns what independence means as she finds a job and then loses it when she stands up for another employee, and they are both fired. Her friend Lela guides her to the seamier sides of independence, even as her boyfriend Robert is more of a traditionalist, and she must choose which direction her life should go. As Melanie reads, she learns of Violet’s life almost 100 years earlier and how they paralleled, both women wanting independence, to make a way for themselves, and to break away from the expectations for women of their day. The plot flows easily, and the characters, both modern and in the 1920s, are interesting people. The Jordan, while just a car, is a metaphor of transformation that works well in the story and is so subtle it almost goes unnoticed.
