White Houses

Praise

“[Amy] Bloom deftly explores what might have been in this novel about the real romance between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. . . . It’s a sensuous, captivating account of a forbidden affair between two women, one of them viewed by all the world as a saint.”—People
  
“‘All fires go out,’ Hickok says, explaining her lingering feelings to Franklin. ‘It doesn’t mean that we don’t still want to sit by the fireplace, I guess.’ In White Houses, Bloom has built up exactly the sort of blaze that will draw readers to linger.”—Time
  
“Vivid and tender . . . Bloom—interweaving fact and fancy—lavishes attention on [Lorena Hickok], bringing Hick, the novel’s narrator and true subject, to radiant life.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“[An] irresistibly audacious re-creation of the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena ‘Hick’ Hickok . . . Bloom convincingly weaves tender romance with hard-boiled reality. . . . Bloom notes that the White House staff routinely cropped Hickok out of photos. In White Houses, she’s in the center of the frame, and nobody who reads this sad, funny, frisky novel is going to forget her.”—USA Today
 
“Radiant . . . an indelible love story, one propelled not by unlined youth and beauty but by the kind of soul-mate connection even distance, age, and impossible circumstances couldn’t dim . . . Bloom’s goal is less to relitigate history than to portray the blandly sexless figurehead of First Lady as something the job rarely allows those women to be—a loving, breathing human being. And she does it brilliantly.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Steeped with open secrets, intimate tension, and historical truths, [White Houses] expertly portrays the kaleidoscopic forms womanhood can take.”—New York
 
“Profoundly affecting . . . Bloom’s Hick is frank, funny, and irreverent. . . . White Houses, by seeing the Roosevelt era through the most unlikely of outsiders-turned-insider, brings a hidden chapter of East Wing history to life.”—The Boston Globe

“A remarkably intimate and yet informative novel of the secret, scandalous love of Eleanor Roosevelt and her longtime friend and companion Lorena Hickok, who relates the tale in her own, quite wonderful voice.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“Amy Bloom illuminates one of the most intriguing relationships in history. Lorena Hickok is a woman who found love with another lost soul, Eleanor Roosevelt. And love is what this book is all about: It suffuses every page, so that by the time you reach the end, you are simply stunned by the beauty of the world these two carved out for themselves.”—Melanie Benjamin, author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue