Iris Chapel and her five elegant sisters, all of them heiresses to the Chapel firearms fortune, live cloistered in a lavish Victorian mansion. Neglected by both a distant, workaholic father and a mentally troubled mother - who believes their home is haunted by the victims of Chapel weapons - the sisters have grown up with only each other for company. They long to escape the eerie fairy tale of their childhood and move forward into the modern world, but for young women in 1950s Connecticut, the only way out is through marriage. Yet it soon becomes clear that for the Chapel sisters, marriage equals death. When the eldest sister walks down the aisle, tragedy strikes. This is just the beginning of a chain of disasters that will make each woman wonder if true love will kill her, too.
From a collection of poetry exploring grief to a reimagining of "Sense and Sensibility" into a thrilling whodunit, literature writer Katherine Ouellette rounds up a selection of books to read this spring.