A warm, sparkling and heartfelt novel that explores the power of second chances in life, in love and in following our dreams.
Ten years ago, just out of college, San Francisco department store heiress Cassie Blake chose a life in Berkeley as a professor’s wife and a volunteer in an educational organic garden; now her husband might be cheating, and her mother is luring her back to Fenton’s with a gourmet food emporium.
When Cassie Blake discovers her husband, an ethics professor, has cheated on her at least once, she flees Berkeley to stay in a Presidio Heights mansion with her best friend, Alexis, the rich, bored wife of a hedge fund manager who constantly flies all over the world. Cassie’s mother, Diana Fenton, takes the opportunity to press Cassie back into the family business, asking her to oversee the store’s conversion of a full floor into a high-end gourmet food market. When once Cassie would have declined out of hand, her unsettling marriage situation leads her to agree to managing the design and the grand opening. More troubling is the quick attraction she feels toward James, the architect of the project, and the increased tension she feels with her husband, who resents her work and puts pressure on her to forgive him for his small indiscretion and come home. With the life she loved crumbling, Cassie must ask herself some unwelcome questions about who she is, what she wants and what’s worth fighting for. Set against the backdrop of glamorous high-society San Francisco, this is an entertaining, satisfying women’s fiction novel that reads like a reverse fairy tale but still ends happily. Hughes has a witty, charming writing style and the ability to create characters that are both larger than life and down to earth (Alexis, in particular, and her motley crew of ultrarich society scions). There is humor, wit and style, all of which enrich the arc of Cassie’s journey to true, authentic happiness.
A warm, sparkling and heartfelt novel that explores the power of second chances in life, in love and in following our dreams.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64333-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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