Preview of Caroline's Daughters Summary:

The real subject of Caroline's Daughters is the American landscape in the 1980s and its effects on those who came to maturity in it. Adams examines life in that gilded age through the perspective of a mother and her five daughters, their secrets and distances, and their concurrent desire for separation and connectedness. Characters are always conscious of their particular place in history—their past, and its role in their present. Caroline and her husband, Ralph Carter, are liberal-radical denizens of a bygone era, just back from five years in Portugal, and aging beautifully, if a little taken aback at the changes they have come home to.

Liza, the would-be writer, provides the most thoughtful insights; she remembers her 1960s childhood while watching her own children play in the sandbox in a park where she went to get stoned in high school, thinking...