Historical Fiction / Jazz Age Romance
Date Published: 07-14-2026
Publisher: Mission Point Press
The Beauty of Individual Things follows Margot Andrews, a young American
woman swept from New York high society into the dazzling yet fractured world
of 1920s London. When the transactional demands of privilege collide with
betrayal and violence, leaving her disillusioned and adrift, she escapes to
the freshwater shoreline of lost childhood summers.
With her past unrecoverable and her future uncertain, Margot searches for a
different life amid Detroit’s dynamic and monied Prohibition
era—with its yacht races, rumrunners, and industrial might. Set against
a city on the rise, she must navigate her family’s ruthless pursuit of
social standing, the magnetic pull of charismatic boat racer Ellis James, and
the relentless echoes of her past. The story explores the weight of loneliness
and the personal cost of love and reinvention as Margot decides whether to
remain a fragile ornament of her family’s design or forge an identity
that is beautiful, imperfect, and entirely her own.
No one tells a young woman that things usually happen because of money,
sex, or power. We learn it on our own. Polite girls go on to elegantly
suppress the notion, but most know it, and I was nothing if not polite. It was
different for Grace. She was a Maxwell. It wasn’t in their nature to
suppress things. They blew them up.
An early lesson remains etched in my mind. It was a summer day in 1913. The
Maxwells had secured a white clapboard weekly rental on the shores of Elk
Lake, tucked among the rolling farmland and evergreen forests of northern
Michigan.
The screen door slammed. I shaded my eyes as Uncle Fred crossed a narrow strip
of beach, wearing a faded black-and-white-striped bathing costume.
“You’ll burn, Fred,” Aunt Lou clucked from her canvas sling
chair under the shade of a lurid yellow umbrella.
Cousin Grace doubled over, shrieking with laughter. “You look like a
ghost,” she sputtered. I suppressed my giggles by intently staring at a
beached canoe.
Uncle Fred hadn’t brought any alcohol on that vacation.
“It’s called drying out,” Grace had whispered one night
after we were tucked away in our shared bed. “The booze turns dusty and
blows away … or something.”
I never saw the dust, but for two or three rocky days Uncle Fred kept to his
room, scolding us through the door to lower our voices. Then one bright
morning, the dust cleared. All breakfast table chatter quieted as he stood at
the head of the table, bright-eyed and eager to lead us on bracing outdoor
excursions involving tree identification—white pine versus
red—campfires, and fish brought home on stringers. I felt sorry for the
fish, but they were delicious.
Now, after nodding in acceptance of his daughter’s ribbing, Uncle Fred
called to me, “Margot, I’ll see you at the end of the dock.”
I immediately stopped giggling. I had been forbidden from docks and floating
canoes because I didn’t know how to swim. At ten years old, I was
mortified by this humiliating precaution yet too frightened to do anything
constructive about it.
Aunt Lou had dismissed all petulant objections. “The water doesn’t
care, child. It’ll drown you all the same.”
About the Author
Karen Thomas Yoo was born and raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She graduated
from the University of Michigan and received an MBA from Duke University. When
she isn’t writing, she can usually be found in her garden or on a paddleboard
in Lake Michigan. A mother of three grown children, she lives in Grosse Pointe
with her husband. This is her first novel.
