Ann McLaughlin's House On Q Street tells of a family which moves to Washington in 1942 when war is preoccupying the country. A ten-year-old's coming of age in this time of conflict is recounted in a moving story of change both personal and political.

Ann McLaughlin's novel The House on Q Street captures the spirit of togetherness and the stress of the WW II homefront perfectly. As you read this book, you are growing up alongside Joey Lindsten the 10 year old narrator as she encounters the joys and frustrations of moving from childhood into adolescence during a time of tremendous personal and societal upheaval. Her loving family is fractured as her father is consumed with work on a top secret project and distracted by an extramarital affair. How Joey, her sister Madeline, and their mother cope is portrayed with realism and compassion against a background filled with urgency and evocative detail. The news, the music, the victory gardens,scrap drives and rationing are all there. You really come to care and admire the characters, their courage and determination to fulfill their responsibilities and perhaps find a little love in these very uncertain times. There is a sense of selflessness and sacrifice for the common good that is a refreshing reminder of how it once was and could be again. This is a wonderful book, and it is definitely the best I have read this year.

So deeply tragic. So tremendously sweet. Ann McLaughlin has captured humanity at its bravest. Artistic, accomplished Hally Blessing is stricken with polio in the prime of her youth, only weeks before the first polio vaccine. Within mere hours, Hally progresses from the elation of her first major venue as a young flautist to the despair of being diagnosed with polio. Overcoming the deep challenges of fear and disfigurement, Hally struggles to find the inner resources which eventually enable her triumph. The scenes, the characters (even the minor characters) are all vividly portrayed. This work is a victory for the human spirit.

Young Julia MacLean accepts employment as a secretarial assistant to the crusty, 1920's publishing tycoon, Samuel Dawson, joining him on an around the world voyage aboard his private yacht. This richly evocative novel chronicles Julia's sturggles to master her inner resources as she experiences and witnesses unexpected love and tragedy. The scenes are sensually described and the characters brilliantly developed and portrayed. Once again Ann McLaughlin has provided a warm examination of the human heart.

Watching a new play by Joyce Carol Oates, and feeling very dissatisfied with the one dimensional, cardboard quality of all of the men in it, I found myself thinking, "Why can't she write more like Ann McLaughlin? Why can't the relationships in the play grow and develop, as the relationships in Ann's book did?" You can read Maiden Voyage on several different levels. It is a fine summer beach novel, full of interesting people and adventure and vivid description. It is a story Dickens might have written, had he been a woman and lived in our times--a Portrait of the Artist ( yes, there are echoes of Joyce) as a Young Woman, growing and deepening and making some necesary but painful choices. It is a daughter's homage to a remarkable mother, a brave effort to understand her nature as a sexual woman and a career woman as well. And far more than any romance novel, it is a story of love--of the love between a young woman and an attractive but flawed young man, of the very different love between her and a cranky old employer, and of her growing love for her work.

In her fourth novel, Ann Mclaughlin continues to draw on the rich trove of family and personal history that has informed all of her fiction...Her latest offering was inspired by her mother's 1924 stint as secretary to newspaper magnate E.W. Scripps on an around-the-world trip. In Maiden Voyage, the heroine is the young, inexperienced southerner Julia MacLean. A precocious graduate of George Washington University, she is becoming slightly bored with her advice-column job for a Washington daily (a typical query: What's a good formula for cleaning white tile?). She has also made mistakes romantically and wants a chance to escape them. That chance comes in the form of a position with the mercurial and domineering Samuel W. Dawson, who has settled into an uneasy retirement after signing over his newspaper empire to his sons. He, too, has made mistakes, and wants to get away. Julia signs on for what is supposed to be a short ocean voyage in Dawson's new yacht, and is astonished when her temperamental employer expands the itinerary to an around-the-world cruise. McLaughlin is a clear-eyed and observant writer, and her evocation of 1920s Washington and the exotic ports on Julia's trip - Madeira, Alexandria, Sicily, Greece, Zanzibar, Singapore, the South Pacific - is fascinating. But McLaughlin is more interested in charting Julia's mind and heart, offering a kind of artist-novel of her development as a journalist and fledgling photographer. Julia wrestles with questions that are as vital today as they were in 1924: What is more important for a woman, a satisfying career or marriage and a family? Do the demands of a woman's work matter as much as a man's? Julia's answers to those questions are, even more than the itinerary, what give this engaging novel its lasting satisfaction. Reviewed by Mimi Godfrey