Oak Knoll

Oak Knoll is the a fictional suburban neighborhood of an unnamed North Carolina city where the entirety of the novel takes place. Oak Knoll developed as a neighborhood in the 1950s, composed of small post World War II ranch houses, like the one Valerie still lives in.

Oak Knoll has been undergoing rapid change and gentrification in the recent years preceding the start of the novel, as wealthy people began moving to the area and demolishing the old houses and the vegetation in order to build custom designed mansions, as the Whitmans do. Oak Knoll therefore represents a clash in values of new and old, and its residents are of varying socio-economic status.

Fowler, writing from her own experiences living in North Carolina which belongs to the cultural region of the southern United States, has the characters and narrators often the presence of southern values and biases...