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The Operator
A Historical Fiction Novel by Gretchen Berg
Subgenres:
- Small Town,
- 1950s America,
- Domestic Drama
This book is for you if you're into...
- Small-town switchboard drama with secrets on every line
- 1950s gossip that spirals into family-shaking revelations
- Sharp humor about nosy neighbors and suburban absurdities
From Little Stack
Secrets take a disturbing turn in this novel set in the 1950s, where Vivian works as a switchboard operator in her small Ohio town. Though she’s only supposed to connect and disconnect calls, Vivian is fond of listening in on her neighbors’ private conversations. After all, who can resist learning what’s really going on in town? But one day Vivian learns a shattering secret about her own family.
If you’re a fan of historical settings or stories that reveal the darker side of gossip, you’ll be eager to see how Vivian’s story unravels as even more secrets spill out.
What if you could listen in on any phone conversation in town? With great humor and insight, The Operator by Gretchen Berg delivers a vivid look inside the heads and hearts of a group of housewives and pokes at the absurdities of 1950s America, a simpler time that was far from simple. Think The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the suburbs with delicious turns of jealousy, infidelity, bigotry, and embezzlement thrown in for good measure.
A clever, surprising, and ultimately moving debut novel, set in a small Midwestern town in the early 1950s, about a nosy switchboard operator who overhears gossip involving her own family, and the unraveling that discovery sets into motion.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone else's business . . .
Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton, and she'd be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls it eavesdropping.
Vivian and the other women who work at Bell on East Liberty Street connect lines and lives. They aren't supposed to listen in on conversations, but they do, and they all have opinions on what they hear—especially Vivian. She knows that Mrs. Butler's ungrateful daughter, Maxine, still hasn't thanked her mother for the quilt she made, and that Ginny Frazier turned down yet another invitation to go to the A&W with Clyde Walsh.
Then, one cold December night, Vivian listens in on a call between that snob Betty Miller and someone whose voice she can't quite place and hears something shocking. Betty Miller's mystery friend has news that, if true, will shatter Vivian's tidy life in Wooster, humiliating her and making her the laughingstock of the town.
Vivian may be mortified, but she isn't going to take this lying down. She's going to get to the bottom of that rumor—get into it, get under it, poke around in the corners. Find every last bit. Vivian wants the truth, no matter how painful it may be.
But as Vivian is about to be reminded, in a small town like Wooster, one secret usually leads to another. . . .
with Gretchen Berg “ I love laughing, and love reading anything that makes me laugh. I think any genre can incorporate humor, and I try to bring that to whatever I'm working on. ”
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