Anything for Jane (2007)

Anything for Jane, the third of Cheryl Mendelson's Morningside Heights novels, focuses on the Braithwaite family — opera singer Charles, his pianist wife, Anne, and their four children, especially 18-year-old Jane. She's their problem child, sour-edged and difficult at home, resisting Juilliard even though she's a gifted soprano. All of Charles and Anne's energies, it seems, go toward placating their eldest. But when their housekeeper, Gabriela, brings her troubled nephew into their fold, the Braithwaites find their lives upended. This gentle — but very acute — novel of manners takes on race and class issues in a way the first two volumes did not, and the result both surprises and satisfies. B+