Historical Fiction / Jazz Age Romance
Date Published: 07-14-2026
Publisher: Mission Point Press
The Beauty of Individual Things follows Margot Andrews, a young American woman swept from New York high society into the dazzling yet fractured world of 1920s London. When the transactional demands of privilege collide with betrayal and violence, leaving her disillusioned and adrift, she escapes to the freshwater shoreline of lost childhood summers.
With her past unrecoverable and her future uncertain, Margot searches for a different life amid Detroit’s dynamic and monied Prohibition era—with its yacht races, rumrunners, and industrial might. Set against a city on the rise, she must navigate her family’s ruthless pursuit of social standing, the magnetic pull of charismatic boat racer Ellis James, and the relentless echoes of her past. The story explores the weight of loneliness and the personal cost of love and reinvention as Margot decides whether to remain a fragile ornament of her family’s design or forge an identity that is beautiful, imperfect, and entirely her own.
No one tells a young woman that things
usually happen because of money, sex, or power. We learn it on our own. Polite
girls go on to elegantly suppress the notion, but most know it, and I was
nothing if not polite. It was different for Grace. She was a Maxwell. It wasn’t
in their nature to suppress things. They blew them up.
An early lesson remains etched in
my mind. It was a summer day in 1913. The Maxwells had secured a white
clapboard weekly rental on the shores of Elk Lake, tucked among the rolling
farmland and evergreen forests of northern Michigan.
The screen door slammed. I shaded
my eyes as Uncle Fred crossed a narrow strip of beach, wearing a faded
black-and-white-striped bathing costume.
“You’ll burn, Fred,” Aunt Lou
clucked from her canvas sling chair under the shade of a lurid yellow umbrella.
Cousin Grace doubled over,
shrieking with laughter. “You look like a ghost,” she sputtered. I
suppressed my giggles by intently staring at a beached canoe.
Uncle Fred hadn’t brought any
alcohol on that vacation.
“It’s called drying out,” Grace had
whispered one night after we were tucked away in our shared bed. “The booze
turns dusty and blows away … or something.”
I never saw the dust, but for two
or three rocky days Uncle Fred kept to his room, scolding us through the door
to lower our voices. Then one bright morning, the dust cleared. All breakfast
table chatter quieted as he stood at the head of the table, bright-eyed and
eager to lead us on bracing outdoor excursions involving tree
identification—white pine versus red—campfires, and fish brought home on
stringers. I felt sorry for the fish, but they were delicious.
Now, after nodding in acceptance of
his daughter’s ribbing, Uncle Fred called to me, “Margot, I’ll see you at the
end of the dock.”
I immediately stopped giggling. I
had been forbidden from docks and floating canoes because I didn’t know how to
swim. At ten years old, I was mortified by this humiliating precaution yet too
frightened to do anything constructive about it.
Aunt Lou had dismissed all petulant
objections. “The water doesn’t care, child. It’ll drown you all the same.”
About the Author
Karen Thomas Yoo was born and raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She graduated from the University of Michigan and received an MBA from Duke University. When she isn't writing, she can usually be found in her garden or on a paddleboard in Lake Michigan. A mother of three grown children, she lives in Grosse Pointe with her husband. This is her first novel.
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