From Publishers Weekly
Looking for Mr. Right and loving Mr. Wrong brings three women together in friendships that last four decades in this by-the-numbers saga by veteran Jaffe (Class Reunion, etc.). She follows the lives of three women-Leigh, Cady and Vanessa-who meet as ingenues in New York City, fresh out of college in 1963. The trio, plus a fourth roommate, Susan, share an Upper East Side townhouse. Leigh aspires to become a casting agent, Cady teaches high school English and Vanessa is an airline stewardess (aka a "vending machine on legs"). Susan, a mousy, slightly eccentric receptionist with a desperate air, is disliked by the other three, who eventually ask her to leave (the last straw is a case of possibly contagious warts that the hapless Susan develops). But on the weekend Susan is supposed to move out, she dies in an apparent suicide. Her death casts an intermittent pall over the next 40 years as Cady and Leigh experience life-altering romances with married men while Vanessa's surprise pregnancy finds her heading to the altar. Jaffe speeds through these decades; her portraits of the women as adults are hurried and superficial, and world events get cursory, cliched treatment ("It was late winter of 1964.... It was, and would be, a year of change. The new hot group, the Beatles, was singing their innocent hit, `I Want to Hold Your Hand'"). The breezy romances keep the pages turning, but Jaffe's fans may feel that she's working on autopilot.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Jaffe, author of
The Road Taken (2000) and
After the Reunion (1985), presents another gentle, knowing, and compulsively readable coming-of-age story. The year is 1963, and college friends Leigh and Cady are determined to begin their adult lives amid the cosmopolitan social whirl of New York City. An ad for roommates brings two more young women into the circle: Vanessa, a sophisticated airline stewardess, and awkward, needy misfit Susan. Leigh, Cady, and Vanessa become fast friends, united by their success with men, their good looks, and their social savvy. But Susan's eccentricities grate on her roommates, and her clumsy bids for their attention ultimately end in tragedy. Jaffe traces the lives of her characters over the next four decades with wit and poignancy. Sensible, generous Leigh falls in love and ultimately achieves both domestic and career success. Worldly Vanessa finds herself trapped in a marriage of convenience and drifts into a series of infidelities. The inner lives of all of these women are compelling, but it's the impetuous, self-centered, and recklessly loving Cady who is the lifeblood of the whole story. Jaffe is wise and witty as ever, and her latest novel will delight her fans--and win her some new ones.
Meredith ParetsCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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