Beth Brookhart’s The Four Queens of the Buttonbush Museum follows four very different women in 1950s California as they are pulled into the orbit of a struggling local museum and, eventually, into one another’s lives. Irene, Odilia, Betty, and Maye Marie each arrive with her own hunger, for usefulness, recognition, reinvention, or simply a place to stand, and the museum becomes both their battleground and their proving ground. What begins as committee work and small-town skirmishing grows into a fight to save Buttonbush’s history from neglect, politics, and the men who assume women will do the labor while someone else takes the bow.

I loved how prickly this book is willing to be. Brookhart doesn’t sand down her women into tidy heroines; she lets them be vain, jealous, frightened, funny, bossy, and occasionally magnificent. Irene’s voice, in particular, has a bright, vinegary snap that kept the pages moving. The humor comes not from easy jokes but from the daily absurdities of being underestimated: the casseroles, committees, social hierarchies, museum budgets, and men with grand plans that women are expected to execute quietly. The result is comic, but never weightless.

What surprised me most was the tenderness beneath the squabble. Odilia could have been merely unbearable, but the novel gives her ambition a wound underneath it, and that makes her harder to dismiss. The friendship among the four women isn’t instant sisterhood; it’s more interesting than that. It’s built out of grudges, practical need, grudging admiration, and the slow recognition that each woman carries some private exile. The book has a bustling, gossipy surface, but underneath it is asking a serious question: what happens when women who have been told to be ornamental discover they are structural?

This novel is ideal for readers who enjoy historical fiction, women’s fiction, humor, book club fiction, and stories about female friendship. Fans of Fannie Flagg will feel at home here, though Brookhart’s humor has a sharper little hatpin tucked inside the charm. The Four Queens of the Buttonbush Museum is heartfelt but never sentimental, funny without feeling slight, and full of the gritty energy of women determined to be seen. It’s a tribute to the women who saved the room, then had to fight for their names on the plaque.

Pages: 356 | ASIN: B0DXVWC7DM