Careers for Women / Joanna Scott, 295 pp.

A small, unassuming-looking novel full of very big ideas.  I would have missed it entirely if not for the glowing praise from Kate Atkinson on the cover, yet another thing to appreciate about that novelist.

But back to Joanna Scott's excellent, serious, and unique work.  Narrator Maggie Gleason goes to work at New York's Port Authority at a time when working women were called girls.  She works for Mrs. J., a public relations wizard who shows her staff what they (or their daughters) might be: powerful, ambitious, compassionate, and female.  When Mrs. J. hires young Pauline Moreau, formerly a prostitute with a seriously disabled small child, she charges Maggie with helping Pauline to make the adjustment to her new life.

Pauline's backstory involves an executive from Alumacore, an upstate aluminum smelting plant that destroys its local water supply  and the health of a Mohawk community while producing the aluminum used by the Port Authority to build Mrs. J.'s life passion: her 'twins,' those towers in lower Manhattan.  Beautifully constructed and thoughtful, I will be thinking about this story for a long time.