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Wall Street Journal

‘The Listeners' Review: Prisoners of Luxury

June Hudson is the preternaturally competent general manager of the Avallon, a posh West Virginia resort and spa whose guests come to take the curative waters—the hotel is built over mineral springs—and to partake of what they see as their due: excellent food and drink, glorious surroundings and white-glove service. 'The Avallon was in the habit of happiness,' muses June in Maggie Stiefvater's wonderfully observed—actually, flat-out wonderful—historical novel 'The Listeners.' The protégée of the man whose family has long owned the hotel, June diligently maintains dozens of gray-jacketed ledgers stuffed with observations and reminders about the preferences of her high-society clientele. She endlessly challenges herself with a gnarly question: How does one delight the rich, 'who could so easily delight themselves?' But with U.S. involvement in World War II in its early months, the Avallon is, for a time, closed to its usual clientele and bracing for a whole new slate of visitors: diplomat internees from the Axis countries and a clutch of G-men to keep a gimlet eye on them. The storyline is based on actual events. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Greenbrier, a tony retreat in White Sulphur Springs, was put into service as a cushy detention center for German, Italian and Japanese legates and their families. It was a bid by the U.S. government to encourage similar treatment for its own envoys abroad. Ms. Stiefvater is known as an author of young-adult fantasy series, among them 'The Wolves of Mercy Falls' and 'The Raven Cycle.' While otherwise realistic, 'The Listeners,' her first novel for adults, has one discrete fantastical element: it concerns so-called sweetwater, the odoriferous H2O that flows hard through the Avallon fonts, and is understood and mollified by June and June alone.