“This story begins with five little girls, each born in a splash of her mother’s blood, cleaned up, patted dry, then turned into proper young ladies, instructed in the wifely arts to become perfect partners and responsible parents, mothers who help with homework and do the laundry, who belong to church flower societies and bunco clubs, who send their children to cotillion and private schools.”

The women in the novel have been groomed for their empty, surface lives from the time they were born. Readers should expect a specific set of traits from the women, who are for the most part quite prim and proper. Even the blood they have so far encountered has been medicalized, purified, and contained.

“She and Carter had moved to the Old Village last year because they’d wanted to live somewhere with plenty of space, somewhere quiet, and somewhere, most importantly, safe. They wanted more than just a neighborhood, they wanted a community, where your home said you espoused a certain set of values. Somewhere protected from the chaos and the ceaseless change of the outside world. Somewhere the kids could play outside all day, unsupervised, until you called them in for supper.”

Paranoia about safety pervades the narrative and is the value many characters hold most highly. Old Village is deeply committed to maintaining its exclusive and restricted community with shared values; Gracious Cay will be appealing because it will be a gated development that can keep the people out with a physical barrier.

“Patricia realized that for four years, these were the women she’d seen every month. She’d talked to them about her marriage, her children, and gotten frustrated with them, and argued with them, and seen all of them cry at some point, and somewhere along the line, among all the slaughtered coeds, and shocking small-town secrets, and missing children, and true accounts of the cases that changed America forever, she’d learned two things: they were all in this together, and if their husbands ever took out a life insurance policy on them they were in trouble.”

The importance of friendship between women, a crucial theme in Southern literature, is one of the driving forces of the story. Patricia has been isolated as a mother and caregiver. The community and friendships established through the love of reading, and the love of each other, will allow Patricia to grow—and to defeat the antagonist.