Meet Vivian Dalton, an extremely vain switchboard operator who works in Wooster, Ohio, and is happily married to Edward Dalton, and has a teenage daughter, Charlotte. Forced to drop out of school at the start of the Great Depression, Vivian also is obsessed with nursery rhymes and strange words as well as gossip. One night, however, Vivian eavesdrops on a phone call to Betty Miller and hears a shocking secret. This secret will haunt Vivian, threatening her relationships with her family as well as herself.
Meet Betty Miller, the daughter of a bank owner who takes appearances very seriously and is seen as a pillar of the community. Betty is also happily married and has four children. She also desires harmony in the community of Wooster but this harmony will be on her own terms rather than anyone else's. Unfortunately for Betty, her father has been plagued by numerous scandals at his bank that she knows about, but there are also secrets that she doesn't know about. It's only a matter of time before Wooster will become a battleground of wills for Vivian and Betty.
THE OPERATOR by Gretchen Berg is a vividly colorful tale of life in 1950s as well as what it's like in a small town where everyone knows everyone. The characters of Betty and Vivian are drawn realistically and readers will both root for and pity them. THE OPERATOR truly sparkles with life, salacious gossip, and is reminiscent of Desperate Housewives (the TV show) because of so many secrets and the performances these women put on for others. Both Vivian and Betty are unlike anyone I have met in real life or in other books.
For readers who want something fun that is filled with gossip, marital relations, and life in a small town, THE OPERATOR by Gretchen will be a true delight.
A clever, surprising, and ultimately moving debut novel, set in a small Midwestern town in the early 1950s, about a nosy switchboard operator who overhears gossip involving her own family, and the unraveling that discovery sets into motion.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone else’s business . . .
Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton, and she’d be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls it eavesdropping.
Vivian and the other women who work at Bell on East Liberty Street connect lines and lives. They aren’t supposed to listen in on conversations, but they do, and they all have opinions on what they hear—especially Vivian. She knows that Mrs. Butler’s ungrateful daughter, Maxine, still hasn’t thanked her mother for the quilt she made, and that Ginny Frazier turned down yet another invitation to go to the A&W with Clyde Walsh.
Then, one cold December night, Vivian listens in on a call between that snob Betty Miller and someone whose voice she can’t quite place and hears something shocking. Betty Miller’s mystery friend has news that, if true, will shatter Vivian’s tidy life in Wooster, humiliating her and making her the laughingstock of the town.
Vivian may be mortified, but she isn’t going to take this lying down. She’s going to get to the bottom of that rumor—get into it, get under it, poke around in the corners. Find every last bit. Vivian wants the truth, no matter how painful it may be.
But as Vivian is about to be reminded, in a small town like Wooster, one secret usually leads to another. . . .
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