Customer Reviews

The Hourglass

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3 star:		(1)
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On the eve of their separation three lonely adolescents, two girls and a boy who have been friends since childhood, make a promise to meet at their favorite spot in fifteen years. Two of the three keep their promise with surprising, unpredictable results. Elizabeth Gage only gets better and better!

When Kate, an orphan comes to live with her adventurous friend Lily France, she feels at last like she belongs to a family. Although Lily and Kate also belong to another family, that one between the two girls and a boy named Jordan Brady. When they all are last together in their childhood this is the night before Jordan is sent to boarding school. During this night they all make a promise to meet again in 15 years in the exact spot. When they are all adults, Kate and Lily lose touch with Jordan. He is a very succesful business man, featured in magazines constantly. Lily is a housewife in her hometown raising 2 little girls. Kate moves to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist. When the 15 years finally passes, Kate returns. She meets Jordan there and even though she dosen't know it, Lily is there watching from the sidelines, ironically the way Kate was the night before the 3 were seperated. The next day the 3 continue with their lives as though the night never happened, until Kate learns she is pregnant with Jordan's child. She doesen't contact Jordan. When Nick (Kate and Jordans baby) is 4 years old, Kate and Jordan run into each other at Central Park. The both know what happenned that night. Jordan asks Kate to move in with him. This is after she had done a 50,000 word article on him and he had a fiance. Kate agreed. THey were very happy for a long time. But Kate always felt that Jordan had always loved Lily. Later Nick contracts lukemia and eventually after a long battle passes away. (ironically the three meet at a funeral of a classmate who died of lukemia) Jordan moves out nad continues his life and so does kate but only to find out that Jordan loved her the most all along.

I enjoyed this book because it gave a real life look at life, everything didn't work out just as planned, at that made it an interesting story with plenty of twists and turns

When I just finished this book last night I was so upset with it. All the trials and tribulations these kids went through in their lives, it was sad.

I didn't like how it was written, I really didn't get a sense of completion with it or how the characters felt. It all felt like the trio betrayed each other and it infuriated me.

I never really got the sense that Jordan loved Kate even though we learned he loved her his whole life. I didn't believe it, even when Kates best friend told her so.

Don't get this book it will make not want to read any other books by this women which is sad, because I bought this book because of another one she wrote, I loved it.

The Hourglass by Elizabeth Gage is a haunting novel of love, friendship, and a fateful promise. As children the three friends made a promise to meet in fifteen years on an abandoned golf course. Kate goes to the meeting place and what she finds there will change the rest of her life. This promise should not have been kept but it was and the story was interesting look at the twist and turns that life brought to Kate, Lily, and Jordan. The love that they shared as children lasted them a lifetime through all of the up and downs of their lives.The simple things that they did for each other like when they first meet Jordan at a funeral they all went for a long walk together and that day was the day there "threeness" started. For a few years their whole lives where each other.They would spend hours out on the golf course just sitting and talking. When Jordan left for school the three of them stayed close together even though they are far apart.This book was very interesting because the story took turns and twists, and it would keep you on your toes by going back in forth between the future and the past.

Simon & Schuster did not want Elizabeth Gage. Joni Evans, then the wife of Dick Snyder (who later ran Little Golden Books into the ground, as was reported by Publishers Weekly many times), rejected the book on behalf of S&S. Bill Grose, the head of Pocket Books, somehow got around her, and S&S exercised its topping privilege to win Jay Garon's auction and acquire A GLIMPSE OF STOCKING for $511,500. Garon's contract was a good one: the author retained all rights except North American. With foreign sales, the earnings reached $1.4 million.

S&S didn't want Gage because they had Jackie Collins, that great talent, and Judith Michael, the nerdy husband-and-wife writing team. They were also offended that this first novelist from Glenview, Illinois, had so much more talent than their own authors.

At a lunch at the Four Seasons Restaurant, Michael Korda and his then special friend Trish Lande tried to get Gage and her husband to change to a writing husband-and-wife team like Judith Michael. Gage and her husband refused. S&S walked out of the Four Seasons while the author was in the ladies' room.

Later Korda tried to get Gage to take a lower royalty than the one specified in the contract. Gage refused.After six weeks of pressure. S&S caved.

The editing, by a faceless group of editors, was finished, the book was ready to go to press, when Korda turned the script over to Lande, saying "See if you can find anything wrong with this."

Lande covered the manuscript with coffee stains and cut out chapters which were crucial to the momentum of the book. In a long-distance conference call to Gage in Hawaii, Korda told her, "You have to make Trish's changes. You have to understand why it is so important that you surrender to us."

Gage lectured Korda and Lande over the phone about Chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald stops the action to simply give the names of the people who visited West Egg that summer. "My chapters are far more important to the movement of the story than Fitzgerald's Chapter 4."

Chastened, furious, Korda said "I guess Trish and I should read those chapters again." In the end the chapters stayed. The book became a New York Times bestseller, But S&S did not forgive. They withdrew Gage's second novel, Pandora's Box, from the stores after one week "for lack of interest."

Jay Garon, furious, moved Gage to Pocket Books, where she received big advances but zero promotion.

As a result, Gage never became a brand name novelist, but her five novels for S&S/Pocket and her two books for Mira remain cult classics with avid fans around the world. Her unique combination of violence, sex, and psychological depth set her far above the Krantzes and Collinses and Bradfords of the writing world.

This sugary, often saccharine story is set in the resort town of Summer Harbor, Maine where the narrator, Kate grew up. Orphaned as a child, Kate was shunted from one relative to another until her best friend Lily's parents, the Frances, took Kate in and gave her a home. "The Hourglass" focuses on the powerful friendship between incandescent, restless beauty Lily, quiet, intense Kate and Jordan, the neglected son of a once prominent heiress. Jordan's mother fell ill after his father impoverished the family and abandoned Jordan and his mother. As children these three friends make a pact to return to their favorite place fifteen years later. Life separates them; Kate becomes an accomplished magazine journalist; Jordan becomes a powerful New York businessman while Lily marries young, drops out of school and remains in Summer Harbor. Fifteen years later, Kate is drawn back to Summer Harbor to honor her promise to her childhood friends. The ramifications from that night will affect her life forever. Gage has always been a writer of soap opera dramas. But this story is bogged down by sentimentality, superficial writing and overwrought plot points.

I loved Gage's early work (Taboo, Intimate), so I bought both this and Confession. I was deeply disapointed in both works; not only are the characters flat, noninteresting, and unrealistic, but the plotline is utterly uninteresting. Perhaps a big part of this is the length; despite its somewhat decent page length online, don't be fooled! The font is large and unwieldy, like the book itself.

This was an incredibly frustrating book to read. The author drops in one tragedy after another, as if purposefully tugging at your heartstrings. The plot -- about three friends and all the terrible, horrible, traumatic problems they face -- is a tired one, and so cliched that you can see all the events coming before they happen. (A death, more deaths, and some more deaths -- after all, this book is about the hourglass). This book thrives on being melodramatic.