From the award-winning author of <I>The Gardens of Kyoto</I> comes this witty and incisive novel about the lives and attitudes of a group of women -- once country-club housewives; today divorced, independent, and breaking the rules. <P> In <I>Our Kind,</I> Kate Walbert masterfully conveys the dreams and reality of a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing during the 1950s. Narrating from the heart of ten companions, Walbert subtly depicts all the anger, disappointment, vulnerability, and pride of her characters: "Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond." <P> Now alone, with their own daughters grown, they are finally free -- and ready to take charge: from staging an intervention for the town deity to protesting the slaughter of the country club's fairway geese, to dialing former lovers in the dead of night. <P> Walbert's writing is quick-witted and wry, just like her characters, but also, in its cumulative effect, moving and sad. <I>Our Kind</I> is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that opens a window into the world of a generation and class of women caught in a cultural limbo.