Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed

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When her brilliant but abusive husband is sent to an institution, New York newspaper reporter Dawn O'Hara Orme takes up a new career in alien territory: the only nominally American city of Milwaukee. She moves into an all-German boardinghouse and joins the staff of the only English-language newspaper in town. Under the guidance of a handsome Austrian physician and an intense, tubercular sportswriter, Dawn explores her new home town and comes to know and love it. She begins to write a novel about her experiences. Inevitably, she falls in love. But Dawn has never divorced her husband, and lives in dread that someday he will walk away from the asylum and demand that she return to him.