A story of a broken family, The Easter Parade is set in the 1930s where sisters Emily and Sarah Grimes experience their first failed relationship. Their parents are divorcing and the sisters only have each other as they move from home to home, school to school with their fanciful mother Pookie, who searches for the proper and well-bred life she desires.
Despite banding together as children, Sarah and Emily grow apart as their lives diverge.
Sarah marries young and starts a family. Pookie is thrilled that Sarah has married Tony, an Englishman whose family owns an estate.
The reality never becomes the dream that Pookie envisions. The estate is run down and musty. Even the grand name of "Great Hedges" that Pookie bestows on the estate can not overcome the reality.
While Sarah starts her family, Emily receives a full scholarship to Barnard. She is off to college where she enters unfulfilling relationships with men and accepts the marriage proposal of an insecure grad student. The marriage ends in divorce.
Following the divorce, Emily continues entering in unfulfilling relationships. She has abortions. She lives the independent life of a career woman that her sister takes pride in, but drinks too much and wakes up next to men she can barely remember meeting.
Back at Great Hedges, Pookie continues drinking until she collapses. She falls into a coma and is placed in a state institution where she eventually passes.
Sarah is struggling in her marriage. With three sons and a husband who works a factory job, the dashing Tony has started beating his wife. Sarah starts drinking and is no longer attempting to write a book that she had so passionately started.
Sarah is trapped. When she finally has had had enough and attempts to flee, she calls Emily.
In just a few sentences, Yates conveys the ugly honesty of his characters.
Emily does not want her sister leaving her husband and staying with her. She fears that having her sister stay at her apartment will disrupt her current relationship with Howard, a man still in love with his ex-wife.
Emily questions her sister's plan and with a few simple words, discourages her sister from leaving Tony. She has chosen to maintain the status quo of a dead-end relationship over saving her sister from an abusive husband.
Eventually, Sarah passes away from injuries sustained from a fall. The police look into the matter.
Howard leaves Emily after finally convincing his ex-wife to take him back. Emily loses her job. She has no friends and no family. Alone in her 40s, she starts desperately calling the previous men she has dated.
Her loneliness becomes so acute, that Emily decides to call one of her nephews and is driven to actually do so a few days later. A reverend and caring man, Emily's nephew invites her to visit him and his family.
Emily's nephew provides a warm welcome, but the bitterness and guilt bubbling up inside Emily boils over and she has an outburst. Her nephew gently disregards the outburst, but it's clear that Emily's years will end in loneliness and despair as they did for her sister and mother.
A recommendation from my fiance's father, who is an avid reader, The Easter Parade is a powerfully written book. It draws you in with the ugly and honest side of people who are neither cruel or mean. Just human, with lives full of failures.
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