The Brass Ring: A Novel About Friendship

Wood’s simple and straightforward debut traces the friendship of three women from young adulthood into their late 70s. In 1946, recent high school grads BT, Joanie, and Edie view a summer waiting tables on Martha’s Vineyard as a chance for liberation from the “tightly bound cocoon” of Little Cliffs, R.I. Indeed, the girls do find freedom—especially BT, who embarks on a summer fling while her fiancé, Leo, is stationed overseas. Decades later, recently widowed Joanie struggles with whether to confess the role she and Edie played in BT and Leo’s eventual broken engagement. Toggling between the first-person perspectives of all three women, the novel shifts between the present day and that pivotal youthful summer and touches on each woman’s relationship and career trajectories during the intervening years. The emotional core is the steadiness of the women’s friendships over decades of disappointments by parents and spouses. Reuniting near the novel’s end, they reflect on the meaning of “coming of age,” with Joanie musing, “What age? Old age? Have we come into it yet? All I know is that life is getting shorter and friends could leave us.” Archival photos sprinkled throughout lend authenticity to the refreshingly unsentimental narrative. This satisfies. (Self-published)